


if you'll believe in me I'll still believe

by Fiver



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dumb boys being dumb, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, New Year's Resolutions, Rating May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-06 16:59:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fiver/pseuds/Fiver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been long enough since Grantaire last saw Enjolras that he can pretend he doesn't even think about him anymore. But as the old year draws to a close, it seems that's going to change, whether he likes it or not.</p>
<p>The new year looks set to be an interesting one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Boxing Day 2013

**Author's Note:**

> NEW FIC! This is such a bad idea.
> 
> But anyway.
> 
> For anyone who might not know, Boxing Day is literally just the day after Christmas Day. It was only after I'd written most of this chapter that I realised it isn't a thing in many countries (most notably FRANCE) and by then I just didn't want to change it :'|
> 
> I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Feel free to come say hi on [tumblr!](http://www.fivie.tumblr.com)
> 
> (Thanks to Orro for proof-reading and tell-themstories for writing motivation!)

~

 

As Boxing Days go, Grantaire thinks that, so far, this isn’t the worst one he’s ever had. His feet don’t hurt as much as he’d expected them to, he’s not nearly as hungover as he knows he deserves to be, and his piece of shit Renault 19 actually started first time when he apprehensively turned the key in the ignition. He decides to call it a win. Because God knows he needs to take those where he can get them.

He drives carefully, mindful of the thin layer of snow on the road because, yes, it was a fucking White Christmas and he’ll put money on the fact that that’s all anyone is going to talk about today. It is, indeed, what they are currently talking about on his car radio, along with the best recipes for using up the two tons of leftover turkey that everyone undoubtedly has. That’s not a conundrum Grantaire has ever had to deal with, himself. Which is to say, he’s never had to think up inventive ways to get rid of two tons of leftover turkey. He does, however, get forcefully invited to his mother’s house every Boxing Day so that she can feed him her two tons of leftover turkey.

At least the responsibility isn’t his to bear alone, he thinks wryly as he approaches the house and finds himself having serious difficulty finding somewhere to park. His mother’s post-Christmas get-togethers used to be limited to Grantaire, his sister and maybe the neighbours, but they’ve been expanding year on year, and it looks like she invited half the town this time. He’s sure that not even his mother can possibly have enough leftovers to feed this many people. Which is why he has two plastic-wrapped platters in the passenger seat next to him.

He finally finds somewhere to leave his car and, despite the fact that the house is clearly full to bursting with people, the front door is thrown open before he’s even up the garden path. His mother is wearing flashing Christmas tree earrings and a knitted jumper with a large kitten in a Santa hat on the front.

“Christmas is over, you can’t wear stuff like that anymore,” Grantaire tells her with a smile as he reaches her and is promptly dragged inside. It’s stiflingly warm compared to the bitterly cold air outside, and just beyond the nearby living room door he can hear a whole lot of laughing and merry-making going on.

“Christmas is over when I say so,” she replies. She holds her arms out and Grantaire hands her the two platters.

“One’s Christmas cake because that shit has raisins and no one wanted it but maybe some of your friends are into that, the other’s just whatever sweet stuff I could salvage at the end of the night. Meringues and such, I think. Most people were too full for dessert, so it was only going to go to waste,” he says. She rolls her eyes, sets the plates down and holds her arms out again. He laughs quietly; she’s five foot one to his five foot eleven, so he has the choice of either stooping down or picking her up. He opts for stooping down. The moment he’s within range, she’s got her plump arms around his neck and is peppering his cheek with kisses.

“How’s my baby?” she coos because yeah, did he mention that his mum says cringey stuff like that and he might not entirely hate it?

“Your twenty-six year-old baby is fine,” he informs her. She pulls back and looks him over.

“You look thinner.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

“You look tired.” This as she brushes her thumbs over the undoubtedly obvious dark circles under his eyes.

“We didn’t finish closing up until about three this morning. I’m alright, though.”

“I made your old bed up for you. If you need to go and lie down for a while just do it, okay?” He’s about to thank her but she’s already barrelling onto the next item on the mothering-agenda. “And it’s freezing out there, you should at least be wearing a scarf!”

“I only had to go from my place to my car, then from my car to here...”

She just tuts at him and starts shepherding him up the stairs.

“Everyone else’s coats are in my room but you might as well put yours in your own room since you’ll be staying the night anyway. You are staying, aren’t you?”

“If you insist,” he says just as they pass her bedroom and he sees the veritable mountain of jackets piled high on her bed. “Christ, mum, who’s even _here?_ ”

 She starts telling him but he doesn’t pay all that much attention because, really, he doesn’t care who’s here beyond her, his sister and his niece. Oh, and Jehan. He just likes hearing her talk when she’s in her element like this. Her voice is warm and bubbly and a thousand miles away from the quiet, shrinking whisper of the woman he remembers from his childhood. If he’d known his father dying was all it would take to bring his mother out of her shell, he’d have killed the bastard himself long before the heart attack got him.

“ _Oh,_ and you remember Helene from my quilting group?” she’s saying.

“No, but go on,” he says while he fumbles in his old and mostly empty wardrobe for a hanger for his coat.

“Well, her son is home visiting from Paris along with his friends, so of course I told her to invite them along. And oh, what lovely boys!”

“Still trying to play matchmaker for me, mum?” he asks with a smile.

“No, but I live in hope. No, I was just going to say, these boys grew up here. They were at high school with you! You’ll all have to catch up.”

“I’m going to need names before I agree to anything,” Grantaire says. “There were a lot of people at high school I’d be glad to never see again.”

“Aah, the names escape me. I know Helene’s son is Courfeyrac, but-”

She’s cut off by the resounding clatter as Grantaire’s arm spasms and slams the wardrobe door shut with much more force than necessary.

“Courfeyrac,” he repeats, and he’s thinking _of course. This is why today was pretending to go so well! So that this would be that much more of a kick in the balls!_ “And his friends.”

“Yes?” his mother says uncertainly. He takes a deep breath.

“Okay, tell me...” he says, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Was one of these friends...tall and blond and sort of...absurdly beautiful?”

“...He was definitely blond,” she says slowly.

Grantaire stares at her for a very, very long moment. It probably looks very odd and worrying from her perspective. But he can’t help it; he’s considering his options. Bolting seems ill-advised, not to mention very difficult to explain to his mother, who would undoubtedly go and beat an explanation out of Courfeyrac and his absurdly beautiful blond friend, five foot one or not. Hiding up here in his room presents the same problem. Which really only leaves him with one available course of action.

“Is Jehan here yet?” he asks.

“Yes!” His mother looks highly relieved that he’s talking again. “Last time I saw him, he was letting Emeline do something with his hair. She really thinks he’s one of her Barbie dolls, the poor thing.”

“Could you ask him to come up here?”

“What for?”

“Nothing, just...” Grantaire swallows, trying to keep the rising hysteria out of his voice. “I need to ask him to marry me real quick.”

His mother blinks at him.

“You might want to buy him dinner first, dear,” she says finally. “I mean, I know you two have been friends for a long time, but...”

“No, you’re right, you’re right.” Grantaire nods dazedly. “Dating first would be better.”

“Oh, how wonderful!” His mother pinches his cheek and drops him a conspiratorial wink. “I always had a feeling about you two. Didn’t I always say?”

She bustles off, looking pleased as punch, while Grantaire battles with the urge to escape out the window. Soon after he hears the heavy _clump-clump_ of Jehan’s boots on the stairs.

“Okay, so your mother just said that you wanted to talk to me and dropped me, like, the biggest wink ever. What’s going on?” he asks as he comes into the room. Grantaire shoves the door closed as soon as he’s inside, for reasons even he isn’t quite sure of.

“We have a crisis,” he says.

“Merry Christmas to you, too,” Jehan replies. The hair on the left side of his head is full of many-coloured ribbons but Grantaire honestly can’t tell if this is the doing of his eight year-old niece or just what Jehan felt like today. Jehan is also wearing a knitted jumper with a large kitten in a Santa hat on the front.

“Did you buy my mum a terrible sweater to match yours or did she buy you one to match hers?” Grantaire asks, pointing to it.

“Grantaire, what the hell is going on?” Jehan asks again. “Why are we conspiring in your bedroom when there’s perfectly good chocolate and alcohol downstairs?”

“Right, yes, crisis.” Grantaire starts to pace. “Right. I think Enjolras might be here.”

“ _No shit._ ” Jehan looks, in Grantaire’s opinion, far too excited and not nearly horrified enough by this information. “Blond hottie downstairs is _Enjolras?_ ”

“What? Fuck. Is he still hot?” Grantaire covers his eyes with one hand as if this will somehow block the slew of mental images flooding into his brain. He remembers Enjolras’s face with admittedly slightly creepy clarity and now he’s trying to add nine years to that face-

“I still think your drunken ramblings about him being a, uh, golden sun god were something of an exaggeration but yeah, he’s pretty gorgeous. Sorry.” Jehan shakes his head. “Man, I can’t believe this. High school Enjolras? You’re-still-not-over-him Enjolras?” He narrows his eyes. “Smashed-your-heart-to-a-million-pieces Enjolras?”

“What other Enjolras is there?” Grantaire squawks, tearing at his own hair. “God, why is this happening _now?_ I thought I had at least another year before the inevitable high school reunion, and I was going to avoid that by, y’know, _not going._ Why is he here? Why is he in my mum’s house?!”

“Considering how much time you’ve spent pining over him, I thought you’d be less horror-struck at having him within gazing-distance again.” Grantaire shoots him a _look_ and Jehan throws his hands up. “Sorry, sorry, okay. Okay. What are you – we – going to do about this?”

“We’re going to be dating,” Grantaire says.

There’s a pause.

“Run that by me again except have it make sense this time?” Jehan says at last.

“I can’t go down there and face him like ‘hi, yeah, it’s been nearly ten years since you last saw me and check it out, I’m a barista by day and a waiter by night and, oh yeah, I’m still pathetically single’,” Grantaire whines. “Don’t make me do that, Jehan.”

“You want me to be your fake boyfriend so you can prove to this guy you’re still hung up on that you’re totally not hung up on him anymore...?” Jehan asks slowly.

“I’m only still hung up on him after a shit-ton of vodka on a bad night, okay?” Grantaire protests. “God knows I don’t have _time_ to be hung up on anyone full-time.”

“Grantaire, you guys never dated. He’s not your ex. He probably gives precisely zero shits about your romantic life,” Jehan points out oh-so-delicately.

“I can’t lie about anything else, my mum would bust me,” Grantaire says. “Please help me look slightly less pathetic than I really am.”

“You’re not pathetic – and exactly why do you think that fake-dating me is going to make you look better, anyway?”

“Because you’re cute. And respectable.”

Jehan fixes him with his most deadpan stare.

“Are you forgetting that I work in a sex shop?” he says. “Not even a classy sex shop, Grantaire. The only reason I wasn’t working on Christmas Eve is that we shut three days before Christmas as an apology to baby Jesus.”

“You’re a poet!”

“I’m a poet who can’t get published in the fancy journals because I like using the word ‘fuck’ too much. Is that really how you’re going to introduce your fake-boyfriend? ‘This is Jehan, he sells novelty dildos and writes poems that say ‘fuck’ a lot’?”

“Jehan. Jehan. I love you and your fuck-poetry is lovely and I’d read your whole portfolio out loud to everyone downstairs if Emeline wouldn’t inevitably go and repeat it to all her adorable nine year-old friends.” Jehan rolls his eyes at the very pathetic face Grantaire knows he is undoubtedly making. “Please do this for me?”

Jehan sighs heavily.

“ _Fine_ ,” he says. He goes over to the mirror on the wall and starts pulling the tangled ribbons out of his hair. “But you’re going to have to keep my wine glass topped up the whole day, I swear. You know I suck with new people even when I don’t have to perform some weird fake-dating routine.”

“I don’t think you’ll need to act much different. People always think we’re an item anyway.”

“Yeah but _I’ll_ know I’m lying. And you owe me big, alright? There are some very cute people downstairs, don’t think I didn’t notice from where I was hiding in the corner with your kid niece. You’ve just killed any chance I had of going home tonight with anyone who isn’t, y’know, _you_.”

“Is hiding in a corner with a small child your most successful pick-up routine?” Grantaire asks, hooking his chin over Jehan’s shoulder and watching their reflections in the mirror.

“Shut up, I was biding my time. You know I have zero game until I’ve had at least three drinks.”

“Lucky for me,” Grantaire says.

“Shut _up_ ,” Jehan groans. He finally succeeds in removing the last of the ribbons and starts raking his fingers fretfully through his long hair.

“What are you doing?” Grantaire asks, raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t know. Trying to at least look respectable? I really didn’t dress for this today, okay? I didn’t know you were going to need me to look like someone that people will be impressed to see on your arm.”

“So not the point of this exercise. And anyway, they better be impressed by you.” Grantaire frowns, stilling Jehan’s hands with his own.

“...Your boy’s a lot more _conventional_ looking, is all,” Jehan says sulkily.

“Jehan, I am very proud to be fake-dating you,” Grantaire informs him. “And I don’t think there will be, but if there is a single mention of how guys shouldn’t have long hair or piercings or terrible kitten sweaters, I will drag that person outside and beat the living shit out of them just like any good fake-boyfriend would.”

“My hero.” Jehan turns to face him and sets about straightening his collar. Grantaire doesn’t often wear formal shirts, and it shows. “So exactly how deeply in fake-love are we supposed to be?”

“I don’t know. My mum would probably appreciate it if we didn’t make out on the couch. Though, actually, seeing as it’s you, she might let us away with it. She’d probably take a photo.”

“We’re going to be one of those PDA couples? Really?” Jehan looks amused now, which makes Grantaire feel slightly less shitty about making him do this.

“Nah, maybe not. I might have to kiss you once or twice, though. To make it look good.”

“However will I cope?” Jehan leans up and plants a kiss on the end of his nose, because Jehan does that even when they’re not fake-dating. “Okay, how did we meet?”

“You know how we met,” Grantaire says, rolling his eyes.

“What, I don’t get a more romantic version for this?” Grantaire doesn’t miss the way that Jehan starts guiding him towards the door while he’s talking, having obviously picked up on the fact that, despite coming up with this master plan, he’s still really not eager to venture down the stairs.

“I really doubt anyone’s going to ask how we met.” They’re out of the room now, and Jehan is holding his hand, probably for moral support as much as to exude the illusion of a happy couple. “It’s really just a case of ‘check it out, I have a cute and highly literary boyfriend, therefore my life has not been as much of a waste as you thought it was going to be’.”

He feels Jehan’s hand tighten around his.

“I’m not allowed to punch Enjolras, am I?” he says with deep regret.

“No, you’re not.”

“No, that would disturb your mum’s party.” Jehan sighs. “Maybe some other time.”

Grantaire laughs, even as Jehan opens the living room door and starts pulling him along behind him.

“Don’t worry, we only have to talk to them if they approach first,” he soothes, because Jehan does not take well to being denied his right to punch someone when he thinks they deserve it. “They probably won’t even notice me.”

“Boys!” His mother is suddenly right in front of them, cheeks rosy from the heat of the room. She looks between them expectantly before noticing their joined hands, at which point she promptly squeals. Grantaire really isn’t sure why she considers that telling, since Jehan is always dragging him around by the hand, but he’s not going to argue about it. The next thing he knows, she’s hugging them both and smiling from ear to ear. He thinks he might even see a tear in her eye and, oh God, this was a terrible idea, wasn’t it?

“Well done, well done,” she’s telling him, as if maybe he fought off a bunch of competitors to win Jehan’s hand or something. Then she’s kissing Jehan on the cheek and saying how wonderful it is that they’re finally together and how she always knew and Jehan is smiling weakly at her in between shooting murderous looks in Grantaire’s direction, and he knows he’s going to pay for this later.

“You didn’t tell your mother that this is an act?” Jehan hisses after she finally bustles away.

“I may not have explained the situation very well?” Grantaire shrinks back slightly. “I was panicking. Be grateful she talked me out of proposing to you.”

“Holy shit.” Jehan groans and drags a hand over his face. “I need a drink.”

“Agreed,” Grantaire mutters, leading the way through the crowd to the kitchen. His mum appears to have invested in an enormous packet of plastic wine glasses for this occasion – he snags two and begins searching among the bottles of soft drinks on the counters for something actually alcoholic. He eventually finds an open bottle of red wine and fills both glasses generously.

“I feel like I’m going to end up needing something stronger than this,” Jehan says.

“Me too,” Grantaire says, guiding him back towards the living room to get away from the crush of other people looking for refills. He’s rather disconcerted by how many of these people crowded into his old home he doesn’t actually recognise. “Sadly there haven’t been any spirits in this house since I moved out.”

“Pity.”

They gravitate towards the back room where the dining table has been turned into a sagging buffet table, not because either of them is particularly hungry but because Grantaire noticed a distinct absence of blond blasts-from-the-past in this area and Jehan seems willing to humour him. And there really is a startling amount of turkey to be eaten. It’s only fair he does his part.

“How was work yesterday, anyway?” Jehan asks him around of mouthful of turkey salad sandwich. “Sucks they wouldn’t give you the day off.”

“Yeah, clearly I need to get into the sex toy industry if I don’t want to work Christmas,” Grantaire snorts. They need to talk quite loudly because for whatever reason they decided to stand at the end of the table right next to where there is a large speaker with an iPod in it blasting Christmas music. They’re currently being treated to a blaring and crackly rendition of ‘Jingle Bell Rock’. “It wasn’t so bad. Most people were feeling festive so we didn’t get bitched at too much. Tips were good, too. Oh, and we also got to wear Santa hats.”

“Ah yes, your dignity is always the last thing they take.”

“Did you have an alright day? You weren’t alone, were you?”

“Nope. My absurdly rich parents are in Monte Carlo because I guess that’s what absurdly rich people do, but me and Feuilly and Bahorel made a decent day of it. We set the smoke alarm off a few times, which I guess is solid evidence that cooking and vodka don’t mix, but everything was-”

“...What?” Grantaire looks up from his paper plate when Jehan abruptly cuts himself off. “It must have at least been edible, if Feuilly was supervising-?”

“Okay, don’t look now, but blond-pretty-boy-who-I-can-only-assume-is-Enjolras is headed this way,” Jehan says, still smiling and munching his pile of sandwiches as if they’re talking about whatever actual normal couples talk about. He’s shooting subtle glances over Grantaire’s shoulder.

“This way?” Grantaire’s insides do some kind of flip and he instantly regrets putting any food in his stomach. “As in towards the food or towards-?”

“Are you going to suffer heart failure if he speaks to you because I think that might be his intention,” Jehan says through closed teeth and barely moving lips.

“Why would he want to _talk to me?_ ”

“How should I know?”

“Is it too late to hide under the table?”

“Little bit.”

“Can we run?”

“He might notice.”

“God this is awful, what am I supposed to say, what’s _he_ going to say?” Grantaire babbles while Jehan takes his plate from him and sets it down on the table next to his own.

“The things I do for you,” he sighs, and then he puts his hands on Grantaire’s shoulders, leans up and crushes their lips together. It takes Grantaire a moment to remember to kiss him back and put his hands somewhere other than at his own sides because hell, some warning might have been nice. He hopes his hesitation wasn’t noticeable. He hears a wolf-whistle from further down the table, so he supposes that means that someone’s buying it.

Jehan keeps it child-friendly, at least – it’s a pretty long kiss but it still manages to be a chaste one. No open mouths or tongues or obscene moaning. Just the kind of lazy slip and slide of lips that seems appropriate for a horribly loving couple who just can’t keep their hands off each other.

When they break apart, Jehan smiles at him before turning his head and offering a much less friendly smile to someone else.

“Sorry, are we in your way?” he asks pleasantly. Too pleasantly. Hearing Jehan speak in that tone of voice sends cold shivers down Grantaire’s spine.

“...No. No, I was just...Grantaire?”

The voice hits Grantaire like the crack of a whip. Well, fuck, nine years really do count for nothing. Four words and he’s transported back to high school, he is sixteen and in love and terrified all over again.

He dares to look and _oh shit_ it’s Enjolras, of course it’s Enjolras, and he looks _different_ because _duh_ it’s been nearly ten years but he also looks exactly the same in all the ways that count and Grantaire is just going to die, right here, right now. Because those _eyes,_ those fucking blue eyes that used to haunt his every dream, pornographic and otherwise, they’re looking at him now and _that’s just not fair._

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Enjolras finishes, and his face is slightly pink, almost definitely because he’s standing two feet away from two people who just finished engaging in an impromptu lip-lock.

Oh God, Enjolras is standing two feet away from them. This is actually real. He is _here,_ he is _still blond,_ and he is wearing a dark red button-down shirt with too many of the buttons undone, and there’s a tie but it’s unknotted and just hanging as a strip of black cloth around his neck and Grantaire isn’t sure if that’s because he was too warm or if he just hates constricting collars as much as he did when he was a teenager. Because he definitely did, Grantaire remembers hearing teachers constantly ordering Enjolras to button his shirt up (whilst he glared daggers at them because he did _not_ want Enjolras to button his shirt up) and _shit fuck shittingfuckballs_ this is not stuff he wants to be remembering right now.

“Oh, no, we were just...” Grantaire trails off lamely, and he’s aware he’s making nonsense hand gestures that mean precisely nothing but he can’t seem to stop. “Yeah.”

Out of the corner of his eye he can see Jehan looking at him with immense disappointment.

“...Right. Listen,” Enjolras starts and wow, he looks awkward. That’s got to be a first. “I don’t know if you remember me, but...”

He’s cut off by the short, barking laugh that just sort of jumps out of Grantaire’s mouth of its own volition. Enjolras blinks. Grantaire laughs again but quells it quickly because he has a feeling that if he starts properly he won’t stop for quite some time.

“I, uh...” He swallows down the hysterical laughter he can feel bubbling in his chest. “I remember you, Enjolras.”

He wonders if that’s weird, if Enjolras will find that weird. Are you supposed to forget your high school classmates? He supposes he and Enjolras weren’t exactly friends. But the idea that he could ever _forget_ him, or fail to recognise him, is pretty much the funniest thing he’s heard all year.

“Oh.” Enjolras blinks again, wets his lips, gives an odd little half-nod. “Right, good. I mean, it’s not _good,_ but it’s...you know.” He makes a few confusing hand gestures to rival Grantaire’s own. “Yes. Hello.”

“Hi,” Grantaire replies, and he really means to say more but he quite abruptly runs out of words, which is just great.

“Are you alright?” Jehan asks, which is fairly hilarious because Grantaire can see him _trying_ to hate Enjolras, but Jehan is just too kind-hearted not to take pity on someone who looks quite as ill at ease as Enjolras does right now. “You look a little sick.”

Enjolras jumps slightly, as if he’d forgotten about Jehan’s existence the moment his mouth had detached from Grantaire’s, and oh yeah – introductions.

“Sorry, this is Jean Prouvaire, my better half.” Grantaire slings an arm around Jehan’s shoulders in what he hopes is a very natural manner. God, doing things you’d normally do anyway really is harder when you know you’re lying. And this isn’t going how he pictured at all; he’d imagined Enjolras standing with Courfeyrac and Combeferre, cold and clearly disgruntled to be in his presence again, looking at him coolly and silently asking _well, was I right? Have you managed to do_ anything _right?_ He’d imagined it being _satisfying_ to be able to look back and say _well maybe I’m not earning the five-figure salary that you undoubtedly have but look, I found someone who loves me, and I bet that’s still a shitload more than you ever expected I’d manage._

Y’know, even if it was a lie.

It’s not terribly satisfying so far, though. It feels kind of stupid.

“Nice to meet you,” Jehan says. He doesn’t tell Enjolras to call him by his nickname, which means he isn’t actually finding it nice at all. Grantaire takes a moment to feel touched by Jehan’s determined vitriol on his behalf.

“And, uh, this is Enjolras.” He feels ridiculous saying it when Jehan _knows –_ he knows who it is, and he knows the whole tragic tale, and this charade suddenly seems utterly ridiculous. “We were at school together.”

“Really?” Jehan’s ‘surprised’ smile is frosty. He’s normally terrified of talking to new people, as Grantaire well knows, but when he has reason to believe that the new person is, in fact, an asshole, he’s the terrifying one. “That’s amazing. Grantaire _never_ talks about high school. Maybe you can tell me why that is? I’ve always been so curious.”

“I’ve told you, it’s because there’s nothing to tell.” Grantaire gives Jehan’s shoulder a warning squeeze because for fuck’s sake, he’s supposed to help make this situation _less_ painful, not more so. “I didn’t do much of anything at high school. Except maybe cry over maths sometimes.”

“What? No, that’s not true. You did a lot of...art,” Enjolras says with the air of someone who doesn’t really have a clue what ‘art’ might encompass. “I remember that. You were always drawing.”

“It always was my favourite way to waste time.” Grantaire smiles but it’s forced and it sort of hurts his face, because he hates to think of all that time dribbled away with paints and coloured pencils and lumps of clay when he should have been learning to fucking _count_. And it was all for nothing in the end anyway, because in the real world who’s going to pay you to sit around and make things with no purpose? Who’s going to pay you to fucking dream?

Enjolras frowns and opens his mouth, but he doesn’t get a chance to speak, because his friends choose that moment to join them, which is kind of a relief. Courfeyrac hardly looks any different; he’s wearing a suit, which is very smart and professional and everything, but he’s still managing to bounce around like a young and highly energetic labradoodle. Combeferre approaches at a more sober pace – Grantaire thinks he’s the only one of the three who actually looks noticeably _older,_ but he knows that Combeferre went away to medical school and for all he knows he might still not have graduated and that amount of studying probably does things to a man. He always was the grown-up of the group, anyway.

“Combeferre, look, it’s R!” Courfeyrac is grinning as he grabs Grantaire in some strange half-hug, half-handshake thing. “Glad we found you, it felt really wrong being in your mum’s house and not, y’know, _seeing_ you. How long has it even been?”

“It’ll be nine years since we graduated come the spring,” Combeferre says. “Hello, Grantaire. Courfeyrac has lost none of his youthful exuberance, as you can see. We do apologise.”

“Who’s your friend, R?” Courfeyrac asks, releasing him and turning to smile at Jehan instead. Jehan smiles back uncertainly.

“Boyfriend,” Grantaire corrects, and he can actually _feel_ the lie growing and slowly slipping out of his control but he has set the stone rolling and it isn’t going to stop now.

“Jean,” Jehan introduces himself while Courfeyrac shakes his hand enthusiastically.

The rest of the names are exchanged along with the usual pleasantries, and then the conversation inevitably turns to what everyone has been doing for the last decade or so. It turns out Combeferre graduated just earlier that year – as a general doctor. But because he intends to specialise in some obscure-sounding branch of surgery that Grantaire doesn’t even pretend to understand the name of, he still has three years of further work and study to go. Grantaire winces openly on his behalf. Courfeyrac, on the other hand, qualified as a lawyer a few years ago and has since been working for a small but respectable law firm in Paris. His father, who owns his own much larger firm, has apparently now deemed his son worthy to come and work for the family business, and so has summoned him home. Which, of course, means that Courfeyrac is staying here, and not going back to Paris. He doesn’t mention if he is the only one of the three doing so.

Enjolras is very quiet during this conversation, mostly just swirling a wine glass that Combeferre had handed him without actually drinking much of it. Grantaire steals looks at him whenever he can, and it’s _weird_ but he slowly starts to get the feeling that, actually, this is okay. So yeah, Enjolras is here, and he’s beautiful (or course he is, he always was and he probably will be when he’s eighty), but now that the initial shock of seeing him is wearing off, it feels like that doesn’t really mean much to him anymore. The sharp and agonising pang of _epic unrequited love_ just isn’t...there.

He stares a little too long and Enjolras glances up and catches his eye. A jolt goes through him, as if out of old habit, but then it fades, and there’s nothing.

Suddenly, Enjolras seems like just another attractive and unobtainable guy, and God knows those are a dime a dozen.

It’s really quite a revelation.

“So what’ve you been up to since we saw you last, Grantaire?” Courfeyrac asks. He’s rocking back and forth on his feet, looking full to bursting with nervous energy, maybe because he’s realised that the responsibility for carrying this group conversation has really fallen to him and that a painfully awkward silence is just one slip of the tongue away. Enjolras is still silent, Combeferre seems preoccupied with shooting him loaded glances, and Jehan has gone very quiet because they are now outnumbered by people he doesn’t know and really, that makes it impressive that he’s still standing here at all and not hiding in the corner again. He does reach out and grip Grantaire’s hand tightly at Courfeyrac’s question, though.

“Working, mostly,” Grantaire answers with a shrug. “Not much worth mentioning, really.”

“You didn’t go to the art school?” Enjolras speaks up suddenly. Everyone turns to look at him in surprise, but he doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are fixed on Grantaire, and God, to think that he used to be willing to crawl over hot coals for this kind of attention.

“No, that never worked out,” he says, smiling thinly.

He isn’t sure what to make of the look on Enjolras’s face. Surely he isn’t shocked by this news? Surely this is what he _expected?_

“Well, how did you two meet, then?” Courfeyrac asks, gesturing to Grantaire and Jehan. “That must be worth mentioning. If you say otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have to challenge you to a duel in defence of this young man’s honour.”

Grantaire doesn’t even have to look at Jehan to know that his face just went bright red. He can practically feel the heat radiating from his cheeks – and he can definitely feel the way that Jehan’s grip on his hand just became painful and crushing. _They asked, they asked, I told you they would ask!_

“We met through work,” he says, because he doesn’t see what the big deal is about telling the unromantic truth. Plenty of people meet their partners at work. “We both got hired by the same shitty restaurant way back when.”

“Shitty?” Courfeyrac repeats with a laugh. “Somewhere we should avoid eating, then?”

“Uh, no, the place got shut down after a police raid found that it was mostly a front for the owner’s pirated DVD, fake designer clothes and drug ring,” Grantaire says.

“...oh,” Courfeyrac says.

“Also a health inspection revealed that the meat the place was serving was approximately forty percent cat,” Grantaire goes on. “But yeah I think it was mostly the drug thing.”

He notices that Enjolras, Combeferre and Courfeyrac are looking at him with slightly open-mouthed perturbation.

“...We didn’t cook the food,” Jehan pitches in quietly. “We were just waiters.”

“Oh, right, yeah. We didn’t cook any cats. Or sell any drugs,” Grantaire hastens to add.

“It was a horrible place,” Jehan mumbles. “Those poor cats.”

“I was mostly surprised it wasn’t human flesh they found,” Grantaire says. “I always had a feeling Thénardier was in the murder-for-hire business on the side.”

Courfeyrac splutters into his drink. Combeferre raises his eyebrows minutely. Jehan’s grip on Grantaire’s hand tightens until his nails start digging into his skin, which he takes to mean that he wants this conversation wrapped up.

“Anyway, I hear he moved to Paris after they shut him down here, so keep an eye out,” Grantaire concludes cheerfully.

“Well, hey, maybe you had to serve people minced-up cats, but at least you got something good out of it,” Courfeyrac says, gesturing to the two of them again.

“Oh, yeah. Yeah.” Grantaire nods in what he hopes is a convincing rather than a frantic fashion. Jehan gives a pallid smile and puts his head on his shoulder. _Hey, look how in love we are._

It’s true that Grantaire and Jehan’s paths crossed for the first time in Thénardier’s death-trap of a restaurant, but they hardly exchanged more than five words for the first two months that they worked there. It was actually during one of the place’s frequent, riotous after-closing-hours parties that they finally, y’know, _met._ It had been a shitty sort of time for Grantaire. Probably for Jehan too, but he hadn’t known that at the time. He’d been half-asleep at the bar after working all day and then doing his level best to drown his sorrows. He’s pretty sure he wasn’t legally old enough to drink at the time but hell, Thénardier was feeding people cats and selling heroin mixed with talcum powder, it seemed unlikely he’d care about little things like drinking laws. He doesn’t really remember _exactly_ what came next – he was so drunk that his liver had probably just given up and left for the night – but he’s pretty sure that his overwhelming _angst_ and extreme level of intoxication led him to pick a fight. The next thing he remembers clearly is waking up freezing on the building’s back steps, staring up at the starry sky with one eye because the other was swollen almost completely closed. Jehan was sitting next to him, smoking a joint and shivering. When he turned to face him, Grantaire saw that his cheek was bruising and swelling, and he spent months worrying that he was the one who’d hit him, though Jehan told him that it had been his bar-fighting opponent when he’d stepped in to save Grantaire’s other eye. He was all long hair and spindly limbs and goosebumps, and he blew smoke out slowly into the bitter air, and the image burned itself into Grantaire’s mind forever. It made him want to pick up a pencil again.

“You,” Jehan said, pointing a finger at his face, “need to get it the fuck together.”

Grantaire remembers staring at him, then accepting the joint when Jehan offered it to him. They sat out there a long time. There may have been some crying.

The start of a beautiful friendship. Or romance, according to the version they were spinning right now.

“Enjolras,” Jehan speaks up suddenly. His oh-so-friendly smile is back in place, if somewhat wobbly. “You didn’t tell us what you’ve been up to.” He looks between Enjolras and Grantaire. “You haven’t seen each other since high school, right? I’m sure Grantaire wants to know. You want to know, don’t you?”

“...Sure,” Grantaire says, not looking his absolutely terrible fake boyfriend in the eye because he knows if he does he won’t be able to resist glaring at him. Jehan is shy and he is lit up with anxiety right now because he’s surrounded by three strangers, but his determination is such that he isn’t going to let that stop him needling Enjolras at every opportunity.

The ensuing silence is short but oddly painful. Combeferre sends Enjolras a look that Grantaire can’t quite interpret. Courfeyrac’s rocking intensifies.

“I was at university,” Enjolras says. He’s still swirling his glass.

“Journalism, right?” Grantaire says almost automatically. Stupid that he still remembers. Enjolras nods.

“Journalism and politics.”

“I thought politicians didn’t like journalists,” Jehan says. He’s completely wretched; Grantaire can see him self-consciously tugging at the silver ring in his nose, trying to stretch his sleeves to cover the tattoos that creep down his arms and onto his hands. Jehan looks exactly how he wants to look, but he’s up against three high-brow university graduates in collared shirts and suits, one of whom he suspects of being a total dick, and he’s intimidated. His unkind brain is probably insisting that they’re all laughing at him, and Grantaire feels like complete shit for dragging him into this – he wants to tell Jehan that he doesn’t have to do this, that he doesn’t _want_ him to drag Enjolras over the coals, but he can’t, and it probably wouldn’t make much difference anyway.

“They especially don’t like the ones that understand politics,” Enjolras says. “Which was all the motivation I needed, really.”

“He’s still going to change the world, you know,” Courfeyrac says, nudging Grantaire. “Don’t go thinking that’s changed.”

“You say that like I should have given up by now,” Enjolras says.

“Not at all.” Courfeyrac claps him on the back. “I’m with you all the way. Just, sadly, on the side of the law now. Hey, at least I could probably get you out of a prison sentence if you ever did something crazy, like that one protest where-”

“Uh-huh,” Enjolras says dryly, cutting him off.

“What’s all this?” Jehan asks. “The system’s broken and you’re going to tear it down?”

“That’s the plan,” Enjolras says with a shrug. “You don’t agree?”

“No, I...do.” Jehan looks momentarily horrified that he and Enjolras agree on anything. “I do.”

“No way.” Courfeyrac grins. “R, you’re dating one of _our kind?_ ”

“Yeah, who’d have thought it,” Grantaire says. “Love really can overcome all things.”

“Good job getting past his cynical defences.” Courfeyrac holds out his hand to Jehan for a fist-bump and holy shit, it makes him look like his sixteen year-old self in his dad’s clothes, but Jehan seems quite charmed by the distinctly unprofessional gesture. “Now you’ve got to work on converting him.”

“He’s tried, believe me,” Grantaire informs him. He’s happy to indulge Jehan – helping him make signs to carry at rallies, listening to him lament the unfairness of the world – and he’s happy to accompany him to protests because at least that means he can make sure he gets home again safely, but they’ve both long since agreed to disagree on the actual politics of the matter.

He jumps when Jehan pokes him in the side, and looks down to see him smiling at him. He looks slightly less terrified, which is nice.

“They call you R, too,” he says. “I thought I came up with that amazing pun.”

“Courfeyrac beat you to it, I’m afraid,” Grantaire says. Courfeyrac looks like he’s about to explode, whilst Enjolras and Combeferre look like they’re holding back groans.

“I told you it wasn’t just me!” Courfeyrac crows in triumph. “I told you, that is the _first_ nickname any self-respecting person would think of. _Yes._ ” He offers Jehan a second and much more dramatic fist-bump, and Jehan actually laughs.

“So what’s the atmosphere like up in Paris? With protests, marches, activism?” he asks. “Because it feels like apathy is winning the war around here.”

“Apathy is winning everywhere,” Enjolras says. “Even in Paris. We need to do more.”

After that, of course, the conversation turns towards politics; how the system is corrupt at every level and needs to be severely shaken up, how the people need to rise up and take back the power that is rightfully theirs. And not just in France, either – as Grantaire remembers, Enjolras’s goals used to be more local, but university (and whatever else he’s been doing; nine years is too long for a journalism degree) seems to have helped him expand his horizons. Corruption is endemic, apparently. It’s everywhere, in every country, and apparently a little group of French graduates are just the people to take care of it.

Grantaire still thinks it’s hopeless to the point of utter ridiculousness – like trying to catch a tsunami wave in a bucket. People are greedy, and unfair, and selfish when you get right down to it, and that’s just life. History is good solid proof of that. He’s never believed that it could change.

He always believed in Enjolras, though. Always believed in _his_ belief, in the fact that he would stay forever true to his cause.

And as Enjolras waxes lyrical about the difficulties people face and what _must_ be done to help them, Grantaire realises, with a sinking feeling, that he still believes in him.

Enjolras’s eyes are bright and intently focused as he talks, his fingers sweeping the air and punctuating his every point. He’s only become more eloquent since Grantaire saw him last – better-spoken and more assured. He’s shrugged off the strange quietness that has shrouded him thus far – his voice is strong and ringing and cutting through even the booming speaker behind them, which is now, incidentally, playing ‘Winter Wonderland’. He’s come alive.

The sinking feeling in Grantaire’s chest gets heavier.

He was an idiot, he realises, to think that it was _over._ It was never Enjolras’s pretty face or big blue eyes that he fell in love with. Did he actually _forget?_ Was he really that stupid?

The pretty face alone could never have won him. As he’d so aptly mused, handsome guys weren’t exactly a rare breed. It was always _Enjolras_ that he’d loved so absurdly – not the face but the mind, the heart. Enjolras had defeated him and acquired his devotion by caring too much and too fiercely about everything, with his anger and frustration at the unfairness he saw, with the way that he did nothing by half and felt everything with absolute intensity. He loved the whole world as if every crime committed was being committed against his own family. He won Grantaire by being everything he is not.

And he still is.

Grantaire feels as if his heart is being stabbed through very, very slowly with a large icicle.

He’s seized by the sudden urge to grab Enjolras by the collar and shove him against the nearest wall – and maybe kick over that speaker while he’s at it. He wants to shake him and scream _I hate you, because I still love you! **Still!** Fuck you! Why did you have to come **back?**_

Before he can do something he might regret, however, his train of thought is broken by his mother crashing into their little huddle wielding her digital camera like a weapon.

“Photos, photos!” she’s saying happily. “Look at all these handsome young men! We need photos!”

Grantaire is seriously going to die.

“Remind me how I turn this on, sweetie,” she says, turning the camera over in her hands with her familiar puzzled-by-technology expression.

“It’s the button on top. No, not that one, not- Yeah, you got it,” he says as the thing finally switches on.

“Oh, good,” she says. “Alright, smile!”

She proceeds to snap a picture before anyone has a chance to obey, and dazes them all with the flash. Grantaire notices her looking between him and Enjolras, and although he knows that she can’t _possibly_ know anything of what happened between them, he still immediately knows that something bad is about to happen.

“Goodness, don’t you two look like Christmas?” his mother laughs finally.

“They do, don’t they?” Courfeyrac says cheerfully. He had been standing between Enjolras and Grantaire but he switches places with Enjolras now – and gives him a shove right into Grantaire, too. “Calls for a photo, surely.”

Grantaire realises they’re talking about his dark green shirt and Enjolras’s red one, which seems like a very _minor_ thing to notice in comparison to, for example, Jehan’s Christmas sweater. Enjolras bumps into his arm from Courfeyrac’s push and Grantaire feels his face burn just from the fleeting warm presence of him, which is delightfully mortifying, thank you very much. His mum takes another photo, once again giving them no time to prepare, and they probably look like a couple of deer in the headlights.

“Sorry about this,” Grantaire says. Enjolras blinks at him, suddenly strange and awkward and quiet again, but then – and Grantaire thinks his heart might actually stop beating for a moment – he smiles. Even the smile is uncertain and awkward, but it’s _there_ , and this day is still a disaster but it’s not going how Grantaire expected at all.

“It’s alright,” Enjolras says. “I suppose we do look sort of...festive.”

He gestures vaguely towards their clothes, and despite everything Grantaire feels himself smiling back at him. His mum is still taking pictures but he hardly notices.

“You need more sparkle to be properly festive,” Courfeyrac says. “We need tinsel. You need tinsel crowns, tinsel scarves.”

“No,” they both say at the same time, and they _laugh,_ and this is all wrong, this is not what was meant to happen-

He’s suddenly grabbed by the arm, by his mum as it turns out, and dragged back a few steps to where Jehan is.

“I _need_ a photo of you two,” she’s saying, practically giddy with glee. “A nice one to go on the wall. Come on, come on, get in close.”

“I will kill you for this,” Jehan murmurs out of the corner of his mouth as they stand side by side with their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling like the happiest couple in the world.

“I know you will,” Grantaire says back.

“Lovely, lovely,” his mum is saying as she snaps about a hundred photos of them. “Don’t they look lovely together?”

Grantaire sincerely wishes that the floor would open up and swallow him whole.

That doesn’t happen, but his salvation does arrive in the form of his niece, who comes bounding through from the front room and launches herself at him.

“You’re here, you’re here, you’re here!” she yells, barrelling into him and bouncing in place. It sounds sort of like one big, confusing word because she’s talking so fast.

“I am here,” Grantaire agrees. “And I think you’ve been eating Christmas chocolate all day.”

“I couldn’t _find_ you,” she complains. She holds out her arms to be picked up.

“You’re getting too big for this, you know,” he tells her, but he lifts her anyway, grunting slightly with the effort. It depresses him that he can remember when he could hold her in one arm and her feeding bottle in the other. “Did Santa deliver all your presents yesterday?”

“Yes,” she says with a definite nod.

“Did he deliver the one I told him to give you?” He’d saved to get her a kid-sized easel because, to his mild horror, she was proving to be as artistically inclined as he’d been at her age.

“Yes-thank-you-very-much,” she recites with a wide smile that is currently missing a few teeth. “Do you want me to paint you a picture?”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

“Jehan too?” she asks, twisting her head to look at him.

“I’d love a painting,” he tells her. “I’d put it on my wall.”

Emeline frowns at him.

“You took the bows out of your hair,” she says accusingly.

“Sorry,” Jehan says. “I had to. Grantaire doesn’t have any bows in his hair. He was jealous.”

“Grantaire can have bows too,” she says, looking back at him anxiously.

“I can?” Grantaire asks. She nods. “Alright, great. You can make us both pretty.”

“Can I do make-up too?” she asks.

“Of course you can,” Jehan says smilingly.

“There isn’t enough make-up in the world to make me pretty, but you can try your best,” Grantaire says, setting her down on the floor again. “Lead the way.”

She takes their hands and starts dragging them towards the front room, where she doubtlessly has all her _things_ set up in a corner. Grantaire is just glad for the escape route.

“Grantaire?”

Emeline keeps pulling insistently on his hand, but he stops a moment to look over his shoulder at Enjolras. Courfeyrac and Combeferre are looking at him too, and he visibly falters.

“It was good to see you,” he says finally.

“...Yeah, you too,” Grantaire replies, not sure if he really means it, before following Jehan and his niece out of the room.

~

It’s barely an hour later – by which point Grantaire has been forced to assume he looks like some kind of death-metal clown, if Jehan’s makeover is anything to judge by – when they see Enjolras, Courfeyrac and Combeferre leaving. Grantaire watches them go with a strange and not entirely pleasant mix of emotions. Is that a pang of _epic unrequited love_? Sadly, he’s pretty sure it is.

But it’s over now. Enjolras will go back to Paris, or wherever it is he lives his life now, and it could be another nine years before Grantaire sees him again.

And that’s for the best.

It really is.

“Wow,” Jehan says. It’s hard to read his expression beneath the cracking layers of cheap kid’s make-up, but Grantaire thinks that maybe he looks sort of sympathetic.

“Wow what?” he asks.

“You’re pretty fucked, aren’t you?” Jehan says, gesturing to the door that Enjolras just left by.

“Watch it,” Grantaire says, motioning furiously to Emeline who is still nearby, rummaging through one of her many boxes for butterfly clips for Jehan’s hair. “...But yeah, I am.”

“You poor, love-sick fool.”

“I’m a fool for sure.” Grantaire shakes his head. “You know, actually, when he came over at first, I think he was trying to tell me something.”

“I think so too,” Jehan says. “I’m glad he never managed to, though. Given his track record, it probably wasn’t anything nice.”

~

“Well,” Courfeyrac says as the three of them start to walk down the snow-dusted street. “I think that went okay.”

“It was a disaster,” Enjolras says dully, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his coat.

“Alright, alright, so you didn’t get to make your big apology,” Courfeyrac concedes. “At least you talked to him.”

“That’s _worse._ Now it looks like I just don’t _care._ ”

Courfeyrac pats him on the back.

“You’ll see him again,” he says. “You’ve been guilt-ridden over this for like nine years now. You can last a little longer.”

“I hate you,” Enjolras informs him. “Why did you have to come barging over, anyway?”

“Ooh, excuse us for coming to your rescue,” Courfeyrac says, feigning hurt.

“We saw that Grantaire wasn’t alone,” Combeferre puts in. “We were concerned you might be in difficulty.”

“It was going to be painful enough blurting it out in front of his boyfriend, but then you two were there too, and I just _couldn’t_.” Enjolras kicks a can on the pavement. “And I think his boyfriend knows. What happened, I mean.”

“Oh, he knows,” Courfeyrac agrees. “He was looking at you like he wanted to cut you up into tiny pieces.”

Enjolras winces.

“I deserve that, I suppose,” he says.

“Maybe. It was quite an epic fuck-up.” Courfeyrac drapes an arm across his shoulders. “But we love you anyway.”

“We do,” Combeferre agrees with a smile. “And don’t worry about it, Enjolras. You’re going to have plenty of opportunity to see him from now on, after all. I’m sure you’ll get another chance.”


	2. New Year's Eve 2013/New Year's Day 2014

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New Year: no one's buying the whole 'fresh start' thing, but it is a good excuse for a party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaah, thank you for all the kind comments on chapter 1! This is kind of uncharted territory for me so it was wonderful to see that people enjoyed it :'D
> 
> Chapter 2 is set at New Year! You can probably see how this fic is going to go.
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr!](http://www.fivie.tumblr.com)

~

 

Feuilly and Bahorel, upon hearing about the whole Enjolras debacle at the post-Christmas leftover-turkey-buffet party, fall about laughing like a couple of spotted hyenas who’ve had a few beers.

“Shut up, you bastards,” Grantaire orders from his favoured armchair in the corner of their living room. He’s not shocked when there’s a distinct lack of shutting up.

“No way, this is beautiful,” Bahorel wheezes between guffaws. “I mean, what the _fuck,_ some asshole guy you knew back before you could grow facial hair showed up, and instead of just breaking his nose, your best plan was to make Prouvaire be your trophy boyfriend?”

Grantaire sends a few choice hand gestures his way before sullenly draining his can of beer and reaching for another. Jehan, who is perched on the arm of his chair and petting his hair sympathetically, hums thoughtfully.

“He has a point. You shouldn’t have tried to impress him,” he says. “To me, it would have made much more sense for you to tell him that you don’t give a fuck what he thinks, and that you think he’s a massive prick.”

“That would be a lie, though,” Grantaire mutters, tracing a finger through the condensation on the cold surface of his can.

“Right, of course,” Jehan sighs.

Feuilly and Bahorel exchange looks and then simultaneously make a dramatic show of clutching at their hearts. Grantaire once again entertains his theory that they do, in fact, share a single brain. Or a single brain-cell, maybe.

“So you give a fuck what he thinks and you don’t think he’s a prick,” Feuilly says. “Does that mean it’s true love?”

“It means I’m an idiot,” Grantaire says irritably. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Like hell,” Feuilly says. “Who is this guy and why did he cause this much of a commotion and why have I never heard of him before?”

“Yeah, seems like your fake boyfriend knew about him,” Bahorel says, pulling Jehan’s hair as he passes them on his way to the kitchen. “Not cool, man.”

“Jehan knew because Jehan is the only one here I can have an intelligent conversation with,” Grantaire informs them shortly.

“Don’t forget whose flat you’re in.” There is an assortment of snacks arranged haphazardly on a couple of upended plastic storage boxes – because Bahorel and Feuilly do not own anything so genteel as a coffee table – and Feuilly snatches up a peanut and throws it at Grantaire’s head. “Or you can go have an intellectual conversation in the street.”

“Yeah, come on, a little respect for the guys who are providing the drink tonight,” Bahorel says as he re-emerges from the kitchen carrying a green glass bottle and four assorted glasses. “I mean, look at _this_ shit, we’re pushing the boat out.”

“Champagne?” Jehan doesn’t even try to disguise his amazement.

“Only the best for you, darling,” Bahorel tells him.

“For midnight, you uncultured swine,” Feuilly says in response to Grantaire and Jehan’s raised eyebrows.

“Pretty sure I toasted in the new year with a Jaegerbomb last year,” Jehan remarks.

“Pretty sure I had my head down a toilet,” Grantaire says.

“Well, this year you’re going to have some fucking _class_ ,” Feuilly informs them, taking the bottle from Bahorel. “Yeah, actually, I have no idea if this is good stuff or what. It was a gift from a particularly satisfied customer. Nice, huh?”

“Must have been some tattoo,” Jehan says.

“Actually I think it might have been the ugliest thing I’ve ever had to permanently ink onto someone’s skin, but it was what she wanted and apparently she liked it.” Feuilly shakes his head. He’s a tattoo artist – emphasis on _artist._ “By the way, Jehan, don’t go getting attached to that bare patch on your right arm.”

“Oh?” Jehan laughs as he glances down at the bare skin of his upper arm. He’s comfortable in tonight’s company and so is wearing a (tie-dyed and slightly psychedelic) shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, which puts the colourful tattoos covering his arms on display. Most of them were indeed put there by Feuilly. “Are you making plans for it?”

“I have a vision forming. I’ll show you later. For now, we’ve digressed. Back to Grantaire and this guy who makes him do dumb shit.”

“Can we _not_ ,” Grantaire groans.

“Come on, we need something to talk about to take us through to midnight,” Bahorel says, flopping down onto the squashed-looking couch. Grantaire sighs and asks God to grant him patience with his asshole friends.

“Alright, fine,” he says. “But the second we hit midnight, you drop it, okay?”

“Deal,” Feuilly and Bahorel say in one voice. Feuilly sits down on the floor with his back resting against the couch, Bahorel grabs a handful of peanuts, and they both look at him expectantly.

“...I don’t know why you’re staring at me like a couple of kids waiting for a bedtime story,” Grantaire says. “It’s not exciting. He’s just someone I knew at high school.”

“Yeah, except last time I checked, you didn’t know _anyone_ at high school,” Bahorel says.

“Or you knew people, but you literally did not give a shit about them and probably wouldn’t even recognise them on the street these days,” Feuilly corrects. “You’ve got no friends from back then, or even anyone that you keep in contact with, don’t even deny it. You’ve never mentioned _anyone._ So elaborate.”

Grantaire heaves another sigh. Jehan slides down off the arm of the chair and squashes in next to him on the seat, his long legs splayed across Grantaire’s lap.

“If they bully you too much, I’ll hit them,” he promises. “But you should tell them the basics so that they can agree with me that he’s an asshole.”

“He’s not an asshole, he’s...urgh.” Grantaire drinks some more beer and wishes very hard for something stronger. “He was at high school with me, and I was crazy about him, okay? Like, seriously. I don’t know if you can really call it _love_ if it starts when you’re twelve, but it was _big,_ it was...” He mimes helplessly with his free hand, trying to find the words to explain how it felt and failing. “I’d have followed him anywhere, you know?”

“In a stalker-y way?” Bahorel asks with a faint frown.

“No, not in a stalker-y way,” Grantaire says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “In a through-fire-and-water-to-the-ends-of-the-earth kind of way.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, feeling wasn’t mutual,” Grantaire goes on. “He knew I existed but he wasn’t terribly impressed by the fact.”

“Nothing anyone can do about that,” Feuilly says with a shrug.

“I know. I never _expected_ anything. He was so smart, so good at everything. I was the fuck-up who was so shitty with numbers that I used to just hide in the library when I was meant to be in maths class.” Oddly, he finds himself smiling slightly at the memory. He liked that library. “And Jesus, he was beautiful. Still is, annoyingly enough. Even Jehan, who is doing his utmost to despise him, will tell you that much.”

“He’s alright,” Jehan mutters. “If you’re into that sort of thing.”

“And the reason that Jehan feels it is his duty to hate him is that, on our very last day of school, we had a fight.”

“You got into a _fight_ with this guy?” Bahorel looks confused by this development. “And what, he kicked your ass?”

“Not a _fist-fight_ , moron.” Grantaire rolls his eyes. “I mean we argued. Doesn’t matter what about or why. We had an argument and...some unkind things were said.”

Jehan makes a frustrated growling noise and thumps him on the arm.

“Don’t _protect_ him,” he says. “Tell them what he said!”

“Jehan, I really don’t want to talk about this.”

“He said you’d never come to anything!” Jehan sits up straight, his hands balled into fists. “You worshipped him and he shit all over you for no good reason! He called you worthless and- and stupid and pretty much every other awful thing he could think of, and what’s worse is that you believed he was _right,_ and you’ve carried that around with you all these years, and yet you’ll still hardly say a word against him! What the fuck is that, Grantaire?”

“Yeah, I think I’m with Prouvaire on this one, the guy sounds like a dick,” Bahorel says. “Want us to smash his windows while he’s back in town?”

“He’s not a dick, alright? Stop _saying_ stuff like that.” Grantaire pushes Jehan’s legs off his lap and gets to his feet. “You weren’t there. You didn’t know him.”

“What’s there to know?” Jehan says. “He hurt you, that’s what I know.”

“Yeah, okay, he did. And I don’t know why he did, and it _sucked_ , and that’s why I didn’t want to see him because I didn’t want him to know that he was _right-_ ”

“He _wasn’t-_ ” Jehan starts furiously.

“Shut up, let me finish. So things ended on a shitty note with him. And he was cruel, at the end, but...I don’t know. At the risk of sounding truly pathetic, he was kind of the main reason I kept showing up to school. And maybe you don’t get that, maybe it doesn’t make sense because he didn’t _like_ me, we didn’t even talk much, but...” Grantaire shakes his head and lets a slightly hysterical laugh spill past his lips. “I mean, what do you guys remember about your high schools? About the _place,_ the people, what it was like?”

“Not much, I wasn’t there very often,” Bahorel says with a grin.

“It was mostly a lesson in patience,” Feuilly says. “Often you knew what you were learning was pointless, that you were just being fed facts so that you could vomit them back up in an exam, and you just had to sit and do it and get it over with.”

“Right, yeah, see?” Grantaire drains his can again; Feuilly wordlessly hands him another one from his perfectly constructed beer can pyramid on the floor. “It’s a miserable place, it’s frustrating, most of the teachers are so fucking _done_ with life. High school’s the one that hammers the spirit out of you. You look up in the corridors and everyone’s so _grey,_ so fucking _dead-eyed._ ” He laughs again, quietly this time. “Enjolras wasn’t like that.”

“So what was he like?” Jehan asks almost pleadingly. “Seriously, what makes him so special?”

“He was just always so...obsessive?” Grantaire can’t help but smile as he thinks back, sees in his mind’s eye the slight bounce of Enjolras’s blond curls as he marched purposefully from place to place, the gleam of his eyes and the triumphant quirk of his mouth as he finished tearing an opponent apart at the debating society, the way he just seemed so much more _alive_ than the rest. “He’d probably prefer the word _passionate._ I mean, totally bonkers. Out to change the world, and all that. But he never gave in to the monotony, you know? Everyone else, they got sick of the crappy teachers and the boring curriculum and they just did what they had to do and got out. Not Enjolras. He wanted to do everything. Most people thought he was just about the weirdest thing they’d ever encountered. But he didn’t care.”

“So, smart and enthusiastic,” Feuilly says, amused. “Must have been a real teacher’s pet.”

Grantaire laughs out loud because, God, the memories _that_ brings back.

“Most teachers _hated_ him,” he says, and he really can’t stop laughing. “He never let anyone talk down to him, and I’m sure you remember how much some teachers like doing that to kids. I’ve never known another straight-A student who spent so much time in detention. He got suspended after some _incident_ – I wasn’t in the class but what I heard was that the teacher had a kid in tears over answering a question wrong, and Enjolras just sort of- well. You’d have been proud of his inventive and numerous uses of the word ‘fuck’, Jehan. He ran the school newspaper for his last few years and almost got expelled for the stuff he was publishing. Brutally honest, totally uncompromising. Crazy. But amazing.”

“Wow.” Bahorel raises his own can in Grantaire’s direction. “My condolences. You sound like you’ve still got it really fucking bad.”

Jehan buries his face in a cushion and screams.

“But _anyway,_ it doesn’t even _matter_ because I’ll probably never see him again,” Grantaire concludes. “So it’s all good, right?”

“If I see him again, I’m going to bite him,” Jehan announces. “I hate him. He’s clearly brainwashed you. You shouldn’t still _like_ him when your first reaction to hearing that he’s in the same building as you is to hide in an upstairs room. I mean, you’re scared of him! He doesn’t _deserve-_ ”

He’s cut off by the start of the countdown to midnight on the largely forgotten television.

“Aw, shit.” Bahorel gets off the couch and pulls the cork out of the champagne bottle with a loud _pop_ before handing it to Feuilly, who starts pouring it out as quickly as he can. The two of them also don’t own anything so genteel as champagne flutes, or indeed wine glasses, and they don’t seem to have found the time to wash most of the crockery they do own in quite some time, and so they toast the arrival of the new year with champagne in a pint glass, two mugs and a glass that might have originally been a small jar of Nutella.

“Happy fucking new year,” Bahorel says as the fireworks start on the TV and they clink their assorted glasses (and mugs) together.

“We survived another one,” Feuilly says. “Go us.”

They can hear fireworks going off outside in the street, too. Very loud and slightly nuclear-fuelled-sounding. Almost definitely illegal. Jehan’s peeking out from behind the blinds, though, and seems to be enjoying them.

Grantaire got the pint glass. He swallows down the few mouthfuls of champagne in it without much satisfaction. He hopes it wasn’t an expensive bottle – it was certainly wasted on their uncultured palates, if it was.

“Right, no more talking,” he says. “I got both of you bottles of vodka for Christmas and I know that not even you two could have drunk it all since then. Break it out. I’m getting drunk so that I can forget this conversation happened.”

~

“Enjolras,” Courfeyrac whines. “You really need to cheer up.”

They are in a bar bursting at the seams with people ready to celebrate the new year, or at least to get drunk, but they’ve managed to commandeer a table tucked away in a corner. Courfeyrac has been sticking cocktail umbrellas in Enjolras’s hair for the past fifteen minutes, with the air of a man playing a particularly deadly game of Jenga, but had ultimately received no response, which was perhaps more scary. The jaunty clusters of colourful umbrellas are indeed a stark contrast to Enjolras’s morose expression.

“Sorry,” Enjolras says. “You can go find other people to talk to, really. I’ll be fine here.”

“You really think I’d leave you to mope?” Courfeyrac sighs exasperatedly. “What do you take me for?”

“Sorry,” Enjolras says again, a flicker of a smile crossing his face. “I just know I’m not being the most thrilling company right now.”

“You’re _always_ thrilling company,” Courfeyrac declares, grabbing one of his hands and planting dramatic kisses on each knuckle until Enjolras laughs and snatches it back.

“Thanks for inviting me out, really,” he says. “I feel like I’m going to go crazy in that house. Start smashing up vases, or something.”

“Your parents aren’t so bad,” Courfeyrac says.

“They’re not,” Enjolras agrees, his expression becoming sombre again. “It’s not that I don’t know that I’m lucky, and I’m grateful that they let me move back in and didn’t make me feel like shit for needing to, but...well.”

“But you feel like shit anyway,” Courfeyrac concludes, topping up both their glasses from the bottle of wine on their table.

“Yeah,” Enjolras sighs.

“Well, don’t,” Courfeyrac instructs. “You’re in a minor slump, that’s all. Give it some time. Trust me, soon you’ll be living the dream – whistle-blowing on corrupt politicians, stopping wars with the power of your pen, all that stuff.”

“Everyone’s being so weird around me,” Enjolras mutters. “And my parents, they’re acting so absurdly _cheerful_ all the time, and practically applauding every time I empty the dishwasher or just...do anything without screwing up.”

“They know you’re not happy to be back here. They’re just trying to be nice.”

“It’s like...like I went to _prison_ and they’re trying to reassure me that they still love me.”

“Enjolras, cut it out,” Courfeyrac says, pushing his glass closer to him pointedly. “In approximately...twenty-three minutes, this year will end, and you can forget all about it.”

“I’m not feeling overly optimistic for 2014, either.”

“You should.” Courfeyrac reaches over and twirls one of the umbrellas still perched in Enjolras’s hair. “Awesome things are going to happen to you, I can feel it. This is a good look for you, by the way. We should make you an umbrella-hat. A bonnet, maybe.”

“I just never thought I’d end up back here,” Enjolras says after a long drink of wine. Courfeyrac immediately refills his glass.

“There are worse places than here.”

“I know that.” Enjolras sighs again. “This just wasn’t the plan, that’s all.”

“I know, I know. But it’ll work out, I promise you.” Courfeyrac gets to his feet. “Wait right here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Bar. We need more wine.” He pats Enjolras’s shoulder as he heads for the bar. “And you need tequila.”

Tequila, as it turns out, really is a cure for all ills. Temporarily, at least. Enjolras suspects, even through the warm, light-headed haze, that he’ll be cursing its existence in the morning, but for now he can finally find it in him to _smile_ and that’s a blessed relief, to him and almost definitely to Courfeyrac too.

“Oh, oh, get ready,” Courfeyrac says, dragging him to his feet and pointing to the wall-mounted television above the bar just as the thirty-second countdown starts. When it gets to ten, everyone joins in, and they shout the numbers along with the rest, and then it’s midnight and there’s a deafening cheer that seems, to Enjolras, to make the very air vibrate. And then everyone is raising their glasses and drinks are sloshing everywhere and they find themselves hugging strangers and wishing them a happy new year over the clamour, and Enjolras can admit that it’s sort of nice. Even if the rest of the year is absolute shit – and for a lot of people it probably will be – it’s nice that they always have this moment, when everyone wishes everyone else happiness, and the _possibility_ of happiness still seems to exist.

Courfeyrac eventually finds him in the crush and pulls him back to their table.

“Let’s call Paris,” he yells over the noise, pulling out his phone. He calls Combeferre, who had to head back to Paris a few days before because his placement at one of the hospitals there starts on January 3rd. By some miracle, the call actually connects, despite the undoubtedly overloaded networks, and Combeferre answers after a few rings. As they expected, he’s not alone.

“ _Happy new year!”_ a chorus of voices bellows through the speaker. Joly and Bossuet, definitely; Enjolras thinks he can hear Marius, too. And at least one female voice, most likely Musichetta.

“Happy new year,” they recite back. The words are starting to feel awkward and unreal on Enjolras’s tongue because he’s said them so many times in the last few minutes.

“How’s 2014 treating you guys so far?” Courfeyrac asks.

_“We’ve started a stopwatch to time how long it takes for Bossuet to have his first mishap of the new year,”_ Joly’s voice informs them. They can hear Bossuet laughing and telling them all to go fuck themselves in the background.

_“No injuries so far,”_ Combeferre says. _“Everything alright at your end?”_

“We’re good,” Enjolras says before Courfeyrac can say anything about his sulking, because the last thing he wants right now is another motivational speech about how everything is going to turn out great from all his friends in Paris. “Courfeyrac hasn’t found anyone at this bar to seduce yet, though, which must be a new record.”

“Easily rectified.” Courfeyrac leans over and plants a loud, smacking kiss on Enjolras’s cheek, earning a burst of laughter and an ineffective attempt at shoving him away. “Enjolras has just been seduced. Official first seduction of 2014.”

_“Oh, Courfeyrac, we have a new face!”_ Joly again, sounding very excited. _“Marius brought along a lady-friend!”_

“Marius! I’m so proud!” Courfeyrac grins from ear to ear. Enjolras knows he put a great deal of effort into convincing Marius that interacting with the opposite sex is not, in fact, something to be intensely feared. “Do I know her? Or, can it be, is it the girl he was always so secretive about? The one he mooned over for months, practically expiring from ecstasy when he talked about how beautiful she is, sulking up a storm on the days he didn’t see her in passing?”

The phone goes rather ominously quiet.

“...Am I on speaker?” Courfeyrac asks finally.

_“Yes,”_ Combeferre replies.

“Bye!” Courfeyrac says cheerfully, hanging up and stuffing his phone back in his pocket while Enjolras collapses back into his seat, laughing so hard it hurts his stomach.

“That was awkward,” Courfeyrac says, but he’s laughing too, even as he tries to take a dignified sip of wine.

“Poor Marius,” Enjolras says. “If that girl stays with him now, we’ll know it’s true love.”

“It’s not allowed to be true love. Marius isn’t allowed to be the first one of us to find someone, not after he wasted so much time running in the opposite direction every time he saw a girl.”

“I’m pretty sure Joly, Bossuet and Musichetta were first.”

“They were a foregone conclusion, that doesn’t count.”

“I won’t take it to heart if you want to go find someone for yourself.” Enjolras gestures to the swarms of smiling people still milling around them. “It might not be _the_ someone, but I’m sure you’d find...someone.”

Courfeyrac rolls his eyes and smacks him lightly over the head, knocking loose a few of the cocktail umbrellas which Enjolras had completely forgotten were there. He starts plucking them out of his hair.

“That joke’s getting real old,” Courfeyrac says. “Picking up strangers in bars stopped being fun for me in like third year of uni. I take the whole thing very seriously these days, you know.”

“What whole thing?”

“You know. Finding someone. Like, to keep.” Courfeyrac takes another drink before shooting Enjolras an oddly shy sideways glance. “What, you don’t think about it?”

“I think I have enough problems right now without worrying about that,” Enjolras replies.

“Which means, of course, that you’ll stumble _accidentally_ headlong into the love of your life, while I remain tragically alone,” Courfeyrac says with his most melancholy sigh.

“I doubt _that_ ,” Enjolras says. “I don’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to noticing that someone is interested in me.”

He could have been referring to any number of occasions in Paris when he failed to notice a person’s affections, but Courfeyrac knows exactly what he means.

“You need to stop beating yourself up over that,” he says. “It’s been like nine years. I’m sure Grantaire is over it.”

“I’m sure he is,” Enjolras says. “I’m sure he got over it _very quickly,_ after what I-”

“Enjolras, Jesus Christ, is this going to be the albatross around your neck for the rest of your life?” Courfeyrac groans. “Look, I get it, it was a dick move, but it wasn’t _just_ your fault. It was like. The world’s biggest clusterfuck of a misunderstanding.”

“That doesn’t make me feel much better.”

“Well, we’re not in Paris anymore. This town isn’t so big. I’m _sure_ you’ll see him around, and you can beg his forgiveness.”

“I don’t think the chances are that good.” Enjolras can’t help but glance around, though. There are a lot of people here, after all. Courfeyrac catches him.

“I don’t think he’s here right now,” he says, amused.

“Of course he isn’t,” Enjolras snaps, because that would make his life way too easy. He’s still fuming at himself for wasting the perfectly good, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he’d been presented with on Boxing Day. Grantaire had been _right there,_ and okay, he’d had a boyfriend who clearly wanted to tear Enjolras limb from limb, and a mother looking for photo opportunities, and some little girl who wanted him all to herself, but all he would’ve had to do was to ask if they could speak privately for a minute. He’d just been so _thrown_ by it all. He’d thought he was prepared for any eventuality – he’d fully expected Grantaire to take one look at him and punch him in the face, or at least shout at him, or _something._ He hadn’t expected, for one moment, that Grantaire would be nervous but perfectly cordial, or that he would look at him in the exact way he always had when they were teenagers. That _look_ that, Enjolras had realised too late, meant that Grantaire thought he was just about the greatest thing on two legs.

He hadn’t been expecting that at all.

It was really more than he could bear.

“Oh, you’re moping again,” Courfeyrac says, snapping him out of his reverie. “We need to fix that. What do you think: more tequila, or my place for dumb movies and a pillow fort for which we are definitely not ten years too old?”

“Your place,” Enjolras answers. He doesn’t want to drink anymore – the pleasant haze is already a fading memory, and he can feel his stomach churning slightly at the mere thought of more alcohol. “I don’t want to go back home yet.”

“You don’t have to.” Courfeyrac tugs him to his feet, plucks a cocktail umbrella he missed from his hair and tucks it behind his own ear. “Come on. I won’t have you going into this new year sad.”

~

Some Lists of New Year’s Resolutions

(Grantaire’s, written at Jehan’s insistence, scrawled in the magnificently illegible handwriting of the very drunk on a lengthy sheet of toilet paper to make clear his feelings about the practice.)

  1. Drink less alcohol
  2. Stop sleeping until two in the afternoon on my days off
  3. Stop thinking about Enjolras
  4. Tell mum that Jehan and I aren’t actually dating
  5. Accept that I am a creep with issues and may actually never stop thinking about Enjolras
  6. Drink to forget
  7. Except don’t drink too much because I’m supposed to drink less



\--

(Enjolras’s, written reluctantly but neatly on a sheet of lined notepaper dispensed by Courfeyrac, who insists that setting achievable goals is both healthy and heartening.)

  1. Drink less caffeine
  2. Sleep at least six hours per night
  3. Do not get into any fights at work
  4. If I cannot find a better job, at least do not lose this one
  5. Finally clean up my mess from high school
  6. ~~~~~~Do the bop bop bop to the top don’t ever stop bop to the top~~



(This last in Courfeyrac’s handwriting and since vehemently scored out.)

\--

(Jehan’s, written in an unlined notebook with pale blue pages, otherwise containing poems, observations and elaborate doodles.)

this year

maybe I will learn

to talk to strangers

as if they aren’t monsters,

because it’s hard to find love

with armour on

and a voice that trembles

like the flame of a dying candle.

(Also I should try to eat breakfast in the mornings before I go to work)

(Also I should learn to say no to a certain fucking fuck called GRANTAIRE who has terrible ideas.)

\--

(Courfeyrac’s, also written on a sheet of lined notepaper, printed in obtrusive block capitals for apparent emphasis.)

  1. CONVINCE THE OLD MAN TO GET RID OF THE ‘DE’ IN ‘DE COURFEYRAC SOLICITORS’



~

Grantaire wakes up with great reluctance on New Year’s Day.

When he is forced to acknowledge that he is, in fact, conscious, he pries his eyelids open and remains very, very still because his insides really feel like one sudden move could trigger an emergency purge of everything he ate and drank last night. He stares up at the ceiling and draws the conclusion that he is in his own flat, though he only has the vaguest memories of leaving Bahorel and Feuilly’s. He is fully dressed, including his jacket, but he is actually in his bed, and he’s minus one shoe, which he thinks shows that he at least made an effort to undress before collapsing.

He jumps (and his stomach lurches) when the bedroom door creaks open; he relaxes when he sees it’s Jehan, with a mug of coffee he helped himself to in one hand. His hair is dragged back in a half-asleep and slightly disastrous attempt at a ponytail, his clothes are creased, and his eyes are still half-shut and puffy from sleep or lack thereof.

“You look rough,” Grantaire tells him with a grin.

“Says the guy whose face is actually sort of green right now,” Jehan mutters, shuffling over to the bed and setting his commandeered mug down on the nearby desk.

“Yeah, don’t sit too close. There is a chance I might throw up on you.”

“I’ll take my chances.” Jehan crawls onto the bed and flops down next to him on his front, making a few pathetic, pained noises. Grantaire lays a sympathetic hand on his back.

“The hangovers get worse every year, huh?” he says.

“Must mean we’re getting old,” Jehan says into the pillow.

“Impossible,” Grantaire says, returning his gaze to the ceiling. “I could swear I was eighteen just last week.”

There’s a long silence.

“You’re going to be sick, aren’t you?” Jehan says finally, turning his head both to look at Grantaire and also to save himself from suffocating in the pillow. Grantaire thinks for a moment.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “Back in a minute.”

He makes it to the toilet, which he decides to count as his first achievement of 2014. He’s come to think of the first of January as something of a lesson in humility; when you seem to start every new year on your knees on the bathroom floor, clutching at the porcelain in front of you as you are punished for your final excesses of the old year, it’s hard to think of the whole ‘new year, new me’ philosophy as anything but twenty-four carat bullshit. The universe is looking at you with disdain and saying _‘well, this is the first day of your alleged fresh start, and you sure look like the same idiot you were last year’._

When he’s done – and admittedly feeling a lot better in the stomach department – he gargles with mouthwash to try and make his mouth feel somewhat less like a toxic wasteland before trudging back to the bedroom. Jehan has drawn the blinds, blocking out the weak afternoon sunlight – because a glance at his phone reveals to Grantaire that it’s actually about quarter to two – and plunging the room into semi-darkness, for which both their pounding headaches are very grateful.

“Look, look,” Jehan says, not moving from the bed but waving an arm in the general direction of the desk, where a glass of water has appeared. “Water and aspirin. Because I’m a wonderful guest and I love you.”

“Can you be considered a guest if you weren’t invited in?” Grantaire asks in amusement, swallowing the pills and praying for them to take effect quickly.

“I should be considered a _saint_ for getting you back here last night. You don’t even remember, do you? It took you _forever_ to even find your keys; I thought we were going to freeze to death on the doorstep.” Jehan peeks up at him. “You really _did_ want to forget that conversation happened.”

“What conversation?” Grantaire says sarcastically, knowing exactly which one and wishing they could just never talk about it again.

“Sorry,” Jehan says. “I thought it would be good for you to talk about it. I find it therapeutic when I have a group of friends who’ll agree with me that someone is an asshole. Guess I should have known that wouldn’t work for you, since you still seem to care about your...asshole.”

“My asshole?” Grantaire snorts into the water he’s still in the process of drinking for rehydration purposes.

“...Shut up. I’m hungover and also still slightly drunk. You know what I mean,” Jehan grumbles.

“Uh-huh. You need to stop calling him names, you know.”

“Shan’t,” Jehan says petulantly.

“Why is there a strip of toilet paper pinned to my wall?” Grantaire asks, dropping the subject of Enjolras because it’s clearly a lost cause right now, and also because this seems like quite a pertinent question.

“It’s your new year’s resolutions,” Jehan says, dragging himself into an approximation of a sitting position. “I made you write them last night. Remember?”

“Kind of. A little.” Grantaire frowns. “Why are they written on toilet paper, though?”

“Because you think you’re really fucking funny when you’re drunk.”

“And why are they pinned to my wall?”

“So you don’t forget about them,” Jehan says, as if this should have been perfectly obvious.

“No one keeps their resolutions.” Grantaire rolls his eyes and reaches out to tear the list down, but Jehan, moving with impressive speed considering his condition, grabs his arm to stop him.

“No, leave them up there,” he says. “You really should.”

“Why?”

“Because you think that all that shit Enjolras said about you turned out to be true. You think that you’ve never done anything, that you can’t do anything.” Jehan gestures to the list. “So prove yourself wrong. It’s a start.”

Grantaire thinks that the resolutions are pretty fucking stupid, even by his standards, and he doesn’t think that succeeding or failing to keep them will change his outlook in any way, but Jehan looks so damn _sad_ and imploring, and he really doesn’t feel like arguing.

“Alright, fine.” He sheds his jacket and his other shoe before joining Jehan on the bed again. “The toilet paper stays.”

“Good,” Jehan says, satisfied, burrowing into his side.

“I hope you have a list to pin to your own wall,” Grantaire informs him. “It’s only fair.”

“I don’t need to pin mine on the wall. But I have a list.”

“Let’s see it, then. Again, only fair.”

Jehan groans, scrambles across the bed, leans over the edge to rummage through his bag which he must have abandoned on the floor last night, and comes back with a small notebook. Grantaire recognises it as the one that he carries everywhere with him. For scribbling down inspiration, and stuff. Jehan has many notebooks. He throws this one into Grantaire’s lap and reassumes his position pressed against his side, using him as both a pillow and a source of warmth. Grantaire leafs through the notebook until he finds what he assumes is the appropriate page. He laughs.

“My ideas aren’t _that_ terrible,” he says.

“Hmm, I didn’t think so either, until the fake-dating thing,” Jehan says. “I feel like we’re actually going to break your mum’s heart when we tell her. I had no idea she considered me such a fine specimen for the role of son-in-law.”

“Yes, you did,” Grantaire snorts. “She loves you.”

“And now we have to upset her! All because you wanted to impress some _dou-”_

“It wasn’t about _impressing_ him.” Grantaire cuts him off before he can assign any more unflattering names to Enjolras. “It was about not looking like a fucking failure. Impressing him never even crossed my mind.”

Jehan sighs heavily.

“You really didn’t need to invent a fake relationship to achieve that,” he says. “Honestly, you sold yourself so short. You didn’t tell him anything about what you’ve done since high school, you just said you’d been ‘working’, which just...well, it doesn’t cover it. If you’d just told him the truth, he would’ve had to eat his words.”

“What truth is that?” Grantaire asks, raising a perplexed eyebrow.

“Oh, gee, I don’t know.” Jehan’s voice turns sardonic. “Like maybe the fact that your dad dropped dead, and you gave up your own dream to come home and work so that your mum and pregnant sister could keep a roof over their heads, and-”

“Holy shit, did you actually just use the phrase ‘gave up your dream’?” Grantaire shakes his head. “What is this, a soap opera? Anyway, I get the feeling that Enjolras measures success by, y’know, _success,_ and not effort.”

“And that makes him a _fucking-”_

“Yes, yes.” Grantaire points to the notebook. “This very poetic resolution here, what’s that about? You looking for love, Jehan?”

“Don’t make fun.” Jehan head-butts his shoulder half-heartedly. “Nothing throws your perpetual singleness into stark relief quite like being selected as prime candidate for someone’s _pretend_ boyfriend.”

“Woah, hey, I’d never fake-date anyone but you. There were no other candidates. You are my one and only true fake-love.”

“I might not have _been_ a candidate if I wasn’t so socially inept that everyone who tries to talk to me ends up thinking that I’m...peculiar.”

“I thought you did well with Enjolras and the others at the party.”

“My hands didn’t stop shaking the whole time. I thought I was going to be sick.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Why am I so bad at it?” Jehan says. “I mean, I like people. I just. Also happen to be very scared of them. Which is stupid.”

“Anyone who can’t deal with you being a little shy isn’t worth knowing, anyway.”

“Yeah, I know that’s how I’m supposed to think about it.” Jehan sighs and shifts – he ends up lying across Grantaire’s legs, looking up at him. “Just like I’m supposed to think that the people who don’t approve of the way I look aren’t worth knowing, either. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck, you know?”

“You’re really worried about this?” Grantaire asks him.

“I’m not pining about it every minute of every day.” Jehan waves a hand dismissively, but he still looks despondent. “It’d just be nice, is all. If I met somebody who liked me, and not, like, _despite_ the awkwardness and the tattoos and the piercings and the terrible taste in sweaters. It’s nice to think that there’s someone out there who might like all those things.”

“I like all those things,” Grantaire says with a smile.

“Yeah, but your type is blond boys who look like underwear models,” Jehan replies, sticking his tongue out at him. “You’re no good to me.”

“You’ll meet somebody,” Grantaire assures him. “It’ll happen.”

“I can’t imagine what they’d be like.” Jehan looks ponderingly at the ceiling. “I think maybe they’ll be sort of like me? That would make sense. I don’t mean that they’ll _look_ like me, exactly, but they might look...sort of different. Like, they’ll also look just how they want to look, which might also be what some people might consider weird. I like to think it’ll be someone who doesn’t hide. Who wears their heart on their sleeve.”

“Do you think that’s Feuilly’s idea?” Grantaire pokes at the bare patch of skin on Jehan’s arm. “A tattoo of a nice, bloody, beating heart right here?”

Jehan laughs.

“I think it’ll be someone that I can walk down the street with, and some people might think we look weird or gross or stupid, but they’d also think that we suited each other,” he says conclusively.

Grantaire just smiles at him. He doesn’t consider himself qualified to offer relationship advice. Occasional one-night stands and the fine art of pining are his only areas of expertise.

“What about you?” Jehan asks.

“What about me?”

“There’ve got to be lots of other pretty blond underwear model-types out there,” Jehan says. “Don’t you think it’s about time you found yourself one?”

Grantaire laughs.

“I think I’ll pass,” he says. “I hear that boyfriends are very expensive and time-consuming. If I was going to get something expensive and time-consuming, I’d probably go for a dog. Dogs love you back no matter who you are.”

“You’re going to get a dog?” Jehan visibly perks up.

“Probably not,” Grantaire says apologetically. “I’m just saying.”

“Oh.” Jehan settles back down. “Seriously, though.”

“Look, I get that you’re feeling lovelorn or whatever, but I’m fine, seriously.” Grantaire never wants to feel lovelorn again, and he’s found that the best way to prevent it is to avoid romantic inclinations completely. In his experience, it’s all too easy to _find_ love. It’s the whole reciprocation part that presents the problem. “The bachelor lifestyle suits me.”

“But-”

“Your coffee’s getting cold, you know.”

Jehan huffs at him, knowing when he’s being told to shut up about something.

“Have you called your mother yet to say happy new year?” he asks instead of insisting that the two of them make e-Harmony accounts or something.

“Not yet.”

“No, of course not, you were too busy doing vodka shots last night. Well, do it now.”

“Yes, dear,” Grantaire says with amusement, shoving Jehan off of his lap and going in search of his phone. “See, you’re only my fake boyfriend, and you’re a lot of trouble. No wonder I don’t want a real one.”

“Shut up,” Jehan orders. He gets to his feet (with an evident great amount of effort), takes a gulp of coffee, and starts to head for the door. “And try telling her that I am, in fact, your fake boyfriend while you’re at it.”

“I’ll try to slip it subtly into the conversation,” Grantaire says.

He doesn’t quite manage to do so.

He figures it can wait – he can explain the whole situation the next time he sees her in person.

Probably.

~

Enjolras spends New Year’s Day alone. Courfeyrac has family commitments, and his own parents are visiting friends. He finds it quite fitting.

He tries to use the quiet time to brace himself for the year ahead.

He suspects it isn’t going to be his finest.


	3. January - Valentine's Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dark mornings, cold weather, and yet another Valentine's Day as a singleton: the start of a new year can be depressing for a lot of reasons. Grantaire finds he isn't thinking about any of that very much, though. He's a little distracted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long and I'm also sorry that it is so long afhkdsghkldsfj
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr!](http://www.fivie.tumblr.com)

 

~

 

When the New Year festivities are officially over, January begins its dreary onward march in earnest. Grantaire always thinks it feels like the whole country is suffering from a mild but fairly miserable hangover for the entire month. The Christmas lights come down but winter continues; it's cold, the much-applauded snow from everyone's white Christmas turns to dirty slush, the mornings are dark, and there's really nothing to look forward to except maybe, you know, _February,_ which everyone hopes will be less depressing. A few overly optimistic stores start rolling out their Valentine's gifts and offers early, presumably in the hope that people will attempt to fill the hole the festive period left behind with teddy bears and heart-shaped balloons, but Grantaire doesn't imagine many people are falling for it.

But while other people might struggle to get back into their normal working routine after New Year, for him it's something of a relief after the madness that is working in the service industry at Christmastime. All at once, his shifts at the restaurant drop drastically, because there are suddenly much fewer people calling to make last-minute reservations for parties of ten or more, and maybe that means less money but it also means he has time to breathe.

His shifts at the coffee shop don't change, though. People will always need their morning coffee, no matter what the time of year. He considers it one of the few universal constants. And that means a lot of very early mornings, since he practically runs the place and has to be there to open up before the dead-eyed, feet-dragging hordes on their way to work or college show up to demand their caffeine fix. The shop is technically owned by his employer, Monsieur Mabeuf, but he's sort of...old, to put it mildly. He is possibly immortal, because Grantaire can remember coming here as a kid and thinking Mabeuf was ancient even then, but it seems that the years are finally starting to weigh on him, and he likes to think of himself as three-quarters retired. He'll still come in to do paperwork or even serve at the counter in an emergency, but generally Grantaire only sees him on the occasions when he pays a visit to 'see how they're getting on'. The first time this happened, he'd been slightly terrified, thinking it was some sort of inspection of his performance, but as it turns out Mabeuf just likes to drop in once in a while to drink coffee (which he insists on paying for, oddly) and regale the whole cafe with tales of the good old days. Grantaire has deep-running issues with authority figures, particularly male ones, but he likes Mabeuf.

So there's no gentle easing back into the weekly grind for him – he's busy right from the start, and really, he does prefer it that way. It's harder to worry about exactly where your life is or isn't going when you're run off your feet. He's currently trying to train a new counter assistant too, and he's doing his best to be patient because, God, she means well and she _tries,_ but she's sixteen, she's nervous, and she makes some truly amazing mistakes when she's flustered. Grantaire always gets landed with this task, because he is the closest thing the shop has to a full-time employee, and he is the only current employee who has worked there for longer than two years. They tend to hire young people, especially students, and he thinks it's because Mabeuf feels sorry for them in the current jobless climate, and he is not complaining about that at all because it's probably why Mabeuf hired him in the first place, but it means they have a very high turnover of staff. Students have a tendency to graduate and move away, or their schedules change and they can't work anymore, or sometimes they actually manage to find a more glamorous part-time gig. As a result, he feels like he's constantly in the process of training one crying teenager or another.

On Monday 6th  January, the day that _it_ happens, his latest trainee – her name is Marie, he reminds himself – manages to knock over three large black coffees during the morning rush-hour, scalding her hands and probably ruining the shirt of the businessman who ordered them. The man, sadly, is not terribly understanding about it , Marie promptly bursts into tears, and Grantaire has to send her through to the kitchen to calm down and run her hands under cold water. He gives the man, who has started ranting about bringing them his dry-cleaning bill, a shit-ton of free coffee and baked goods and scrawls a handwritten 'voucher' for his next order free too on the back of his receipt and sends him away somewhat placated. He mops up the mess in between taking the next customer's order, manages the rest of rush-hour by himself, and somehow manages to keep smiling through it all and not claw some rude bastard's face off. He's very proud of his acquired ability to remain civil under extreme pressure. Gradually, the tidal wave of customers shrinks to a trickle of latecomers, and finally the shop is empty for the first time since seven AM. Grantaire lets out a long breath and folds his arms on top of the counter and rests his head on them. Just for a _minute._ He's just wondering whether he needs to fill out an accident report form for Marie when he hears the tinkle of the bell as the door opens again. He takes a millisecond to pull a face at the counter before shooting upright with a bright smile.

“Hey, good morning, what can...I...?” The words die on his lips in spectacular fashion when, like the true stuff of nightmares, he finds himself looking into a painfully familiar pair of blue eyes.

Enjolras stares back at him with a mirror image of what Grantaire imagines his own expression must look like right now. That is to say, surprised – no, _stunned –_ and just a little bit horrified. There is a heavy silence between them, only made worse by the shop radio, which continues to cheerfully play Beyoncé with complete disregard for the current situation.

“I didn't know you worked here,” Enjolras says at the exact same moment that Grantaire says, “I thought you went back to Paris.” It's also at that moment that Grantaire realises that, wait, no one ever actually told him that, he just assumed, and that was dumb.

“Huh? Oh. No, I'm back living here. For now,” Enjolras says. He breaks eye contact first. He suddenly seems to become very interested in the specials chalkboard, which declares that blueberry muffins are two for one today. He seems reluctant to actually approach the counter.

“Oh.” And holy Jesus, Grantaire wants to ask why, because this town was too small for Enjolras even when he was a teenager and he can't imagine that that's changed, but he reminds himself that it's none of his business. It doesn't matter that Enjolras seems to be the person he's fated to never quite get over; to Enjolras, they're just two strangers who haven't seen each other in almost a decade, and personal questions are probably not the way to go. “Good. That's great. Uh, yeah. Welcome back.”

Enjolras blinks and then looks at him incredulously.

“Thanks?” he says in a voice that can only be described as cautious, like he's not sure if that was meant to be a joke or not.

“...Yeah.” Grantaire is sure that this could not get any more painful, not even if the building suddenly exploded around them. He shakes himself slightly. “Sorry, yeah, I really do work here and I'm normally better at it than this. What can I get you?”

“Um.” Enjolras fumbles in his jacket pocket and extracts a scrap of paper, which he then proceeds to squint at as if it personally offends him in some way. “Right, can I get...” He trails off, sighs and seems to deflate. He steps forward and holds the paper out over the counter. “Is it easier if I just give you this?”

Grantaire accepts it with a bemused frown; he sees that it's a list of names, each with a particular coffee order next to it.

“Are you going to be able to carry all of these?” he finds himself asking. There are so many that it's honestly his first concern.

“I guess I'll have to,” Enjolras replies. He sounds irritable, and when Grantaire glances up he sees that he's looking despondently at the floor.

“At least I know it's not all for you,” Grantaire says, and wow, humour has never been his strong point, but that was pretty pathetic, even for him. He turns away and starts making the coffee, since that's his job and all. He recognises the names on the order list, though, and he can't help but ask. “The guys at the local paper, right?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Enjolras wince. He doesn't come out and ask why Enjolras is getting coffee for the whole newspaper office, but he supposes the question is somewhat implied.

“That's where I'm working,” he says. “Just started today.”

“ _Right._ ” Grantaire would smack himself over the head if he wasn't in the midst of pouring an espresso macchiato, the second drink on the list. “Of course. Journalism, right. That's what you do.”

“Is it?” Enjolras mutters.

“I'm...pretty sure it is?”

“It seems that what I do is get the coffee,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire blinks, chances another glance over his shoulder at him. Enjolras notices.

“Sorry,” he says. “That was...yeah, never mind.”

And, oh. Enjolras is _miserable;_ Grantaire suddenly sees it so clearly that he can't believe it took him this long to notice. He doesn't even pretend to know why, buthe supposes it doesn't really matter. Fact is, Enjolras is here, and he is very, very unhappy, and even after nine years of absence, Grantaire finds he can't bear that. He's sure Jehan will scream in despair when he inevitably tells him about this later, but he really can't bear to see Enjolras sad. He's sure that means he's an idiot, or obsessed, or something equally creepy, but he pushes that to the back of his mind for now.

“Well, I'm the guy who makes the coffee,” he says with a faint smile, starting to line up the filled cups on the counter. “So I guess you're still a step above me on the ladder, at least.”

And isn't it funny that just a moment ago he was writhing inside with the humiliation of Enjolras being here and seeing exactly what he's managed to make of himself, and yet he doesn't hesitate to turn it into a joke on himself to make Enjolras feel better? That probably says something about him, too.

“I wouldn't say that,” Enjolras says, frowning.

“Anyway, the guys from the paper? I don't remember the last time I saw one of them do something for themselves. I think maybe their asses are actually fused to their office chairs by now.” Grantaire gets the feeling that he should shut up, but instead finds himself shouting to be heard over the hiss and rattle of the coffee machine. “Better to be the guy who gets the coffee than be one of them. And have some pity, I mean, you must be the youngest person in that office by what, about thirty years?”

He thinks he hears Enjolras laugh quietly over the ruckus, but that could just be wishful thinking.

“When they see how good you are, they won't send you on coffee runs anymore,” Grantaire says. Unfortunately, he says it just as the noise of the machine cuts out, and it's not until it's too late that he realises that might seem like a weird thing to say, and the sudden silence doesn't help.

Enjolras definitely does laugh this time; Grantaire sees it, though it's hardly more than a quiet puff of breath.

“How good I am?” Enjolras says. “Come on, you haven't seen me in almost nine years. The last thing of mine you read was the school paper.”

“You say that like there was ever any doubt that you'd be brilliant,” Grantaire says, and this is definitely straying into creepy territory and he _needs to stop._ “And that paper was a journalistic masterpiece. The article where you called the principal a 'bigoted, obtuse, actual fucking dinosaur' was my favourite, I think.”

Enjolras makes a small choking noise.

“How do you remember that?” he asks in disbelief. Grantaire shoots him a quick smile and does not say _because I read every word you ever wrote and probably committed most of them to memory?_

He's surprised by how easy this is. He's sure that the minute Enjolras leaves, he'll immediately regret every word that left his mouth in his presence, but right now he actually feels _okay_. He can _talk,_ which is something he generally had an issue with when it came to Enjolras. He thought they only got through the Boxing Day party without any casualties because they had Jehan, Courfeyrac and Combeferre to act as a buffer zone, but now it's just the two of them, with no back-up, and it seems like they can actually speak like civilised adults. They were never very good at that before. Maybe that's the difference nine years makes.

“Happy New Year, by the way,” Enjolras says suddenly.

“Same to you,” Grantaire replies, and shit, he's actually having to bite down a big stupid smile because maybe Enjolras is just being polite, but this is probably the _nicest_ conversation they've ever had and apparently he's just pathetic enough to be delighted by that.

“Sorry about Boxing Day, by the way. It must have seemed really odd, the three of us just showing up at your house like that,” Enjolras goes on. “Courfeyrac insisted.”

“It was a surprise, I'll give you that,” Grantaire says, remembering his crisis-meeting with Jehan in his old bedroom. He remembers expecting Enjolras to be cold and full of distaste at seeing him again, not because he thinks Enjolras is a cold and distasteful person but just because he thinks that's kind of a valid reaction to seeing him. He's still thrown off by the fact that that didn't happen.

“It's alright,” Enjolras says with a shrug. “I'm sure I was the last person you wanted to see again.”

Grantaire nearly drops the cup he's holding, which would have been a shame because it's the last one on the list, thank God.

“What?” He frowns. He contemplates the possibility that he has been thrown into a tangent universe. “What makes you say that?”

Enjolras just raises his eyebrows at him.

“You're working just now, so I should get out of your way,” he says, pulling out his wallet and taking out a card to pay for the order. “But there is something I'd really like to talk to you about, whenever you've got a minute.”

“That sounds...serious,” Grantaire says slowly.

“Just whenever suits you,” Enjolras says absently. “Apart from when I'm getting coffee, it looks like my schedule is pretty flexible. By which I mean there's nothing for me to do.”

“I finish here at two today, if it's really so important...?” Grantaire is starting to feel mildly terrified, because being civil to one another is one thing, but Enjolras actively going out of his way to talk to him is unheard of, unnatural and frankly frightening. He has no idea what this could be about. He can barely comprehend that this is a _thing._ Enjolras might as well have said that he wants to talk to a giraffe.

“Sure. Yeah. That works. If that's alright.” Enjolras looks terribly uncertain about this whole thing too, and that just makes it weirder and scarier.

“Your name isn't on this list, by the way,” Grantaire says, holding up the order slip. Anything to change the subject, dear God. “What, are you not allowed coffee on your first day?”

“I'm supposed to be cutting back,” Enjolras says. It's Grantaire's turn to raise his eyebrows.

“On your first day at a new job?” he says. “Hey, I won't tell if you don't.”

“...Honestly, I would kill for an espresso right now,” Enjolras says with a somewhat pained smile.

And hey, espresso Grantaire can do, and so he does, and he does so without any further talking. Then he carefully packs all the drinks into cardboard carriers, though he'll still be impressed if Enjolras manages to get them all back to the office unspilt. Enjolras is studying the receipt.

“You didn't charge me for the espresso,” he says.

“Of course I didn't. Anyone doing a coffee run for a big group of lazy people gets their drink on the house,” Grantaire tells him.

“Is that a rule?” Enjolras asks.

“It is now. I just made it up there.”

He pushes the drinks across the counter. Enjolras just looks at them.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” he asks finally. He looks up, just for a moment, and in all his life Grantaire has never seen Enjolras – self-assured king-of-words Enjolras – look so _unsure._

“I...honestly don't know how to answer that question,” Grantaire says. He can feel his newly acquired ability-to-talk-to-Enjolras-almost-like-a-normal-person quickly fleeing. “Uh. Nope. I got nothing. Just take your shitload of coffee. I'll try to be more of an asshole later if that's what you want.”

“It might help,” Enjolras says. He somehow manages to gather all of the carriers into his arms. He doesn't say goodbye – just nods and shoots Grantaire an awkward semblance of a smile before leaving with as much dignity as he can manage. Grantaire watches him go. The moment he's out of sight, he immediately wonders if he was ever here at all or if this is just the day that he finally cracks up, because the whole situation seems _extremely unlikely._

He remains standing there, dazed in the silence still only disrupted by the relentless radio, until Marie emerges from the kitchen. She's stopped crying but her face is red and blotchy and her eyes are bloodshot to hell.

“Hey! Hey.” Grantaire had sort of forgotten she was here. “Your hands okay?”

“Yeah.” Her voice is still shaky. “I'm _so_ sorry, I don't know how I even-”

“It's fine, it happens,” he says, waving her off. “We're going to fill in an accident report, though. And then René should be here to start his shift in half an hour. And then I'm going to go for my break.”

Because he really, really needs a break now. 

~ 

A Series of Text Messages

 

Grantaire: you got a minute?

Jehan: no I'm very busy still giving refunds to women whose husbands bought them PVC nurse costumes for christmas

Jehan: but that sounds kind of ominous so I'll make time, what's wrong

Grantaire: okay don't go nuts but Enjolras was just here

Jehan: WHAT

Jehan: like at the coffee shop???

Jehan: what the fuck why

Grantaire: you're really asking why he was at a coffee shop?

Jehan: I thought he was going back to Paris?? far away where he can't hurt anyone?

Grantaire: yeah no turns out that's not a thing that's happening

Jehan: well shit. I hope you bit him on my behalf

Jehan: oh who am I kidding you probably gave him free coffee or something

Jehan: ...wait did you actually

Grantaire: um

Jehan: OH MY FUCKING GOD YOU ACTUALLY DID WHY

Grantaire: look this isn't what I wanted to talk about

Jehan: WHY WHY WHY WHY

Grantaire: Jehan focus this is important

Jehan: you better give me free coffee next time I visit

Grantaire: he's coming back later

Jehan: ???

Grantaire: he said there's something he wants to talk to me about. 'Something'. I might explode. What the hell does that mean?

Grantaire: Jehan?

Grantaire: help?

Jehan: huh

Grantaire: what?

Jehan: nothing. What are you going to do?

Grantaire: that's what I'm asking, what should I do?

Grantaire: don't say punch him

Jehan: punch him

Jehan: shit

Jehan: okay. I don't know. Just don't take any crap from him.

Grantaire: definitely going to explode

Jehan: don't explode

Grantaire: what could he want to talk to me about?? seriously?

Jehan: why do you think I'd know, literally all I know about him is that he was your high school wet dream and also a total dick to you

Grantaire: you're a fucking poet and you literally couldn't word that any more nicely?

Jehan: do you want me to try and take my lunchbreak while he's there? I could come for moral support?

Grantaire: part of me wants to say yes but another part is saying no no no stay far away I do not want any maulings in my place of work

Grantaire: also that'd be like an extra train ticket for you and you'd miss your whole break

Jehan: you could always give me free coffee. And food.

Grantaire: stay away. I will face this like a man. Hopefully.

Jehan: fine but if he says one shitty thing I will HUNT HIM DOWN

Jehan: also I'm totally coming to your place tonight to hear EVERYTHING.

~

Grantaire had been sure that, by the time two o'clock rolled around, he'd be so nervous that he'd be ready to puke. As it happens, business picks up again after his break, and he's too busy to worry. Actually, by the time his shift comes to an end, and he sees Enjolras slip into the shop again, a strange kind of calm has gripped him – the kind of calm that only comes from repetitively making coffee, putting pastries in paper bags, taking money and giving change for several hours. You sort of lose your capacity for actual human emotion after enough of that. He raises his hand in a small, casual wave in Enjolras's direction, as he would if it was Jehan or Bahorel coming to meet him after work, before ducking through the back to grab his jacket and his keys. When he comes back out, Enjolras is hovering awkwardly near the door. Funnily, he's the one who sort of looks ready to puke. Grantaire once again gets the feeling that the universe got flipped inside out when he wasn't paying attention.

“Hi,” Enjolras says.

“Hey. Do you want to...?” Grantaire gestures vaguely towards a nearby table. Enjolras hesitates.

“Can we walk?” He jerks his thumb in the direction of the street. “Do you mind?”

“Walking's fine,” Grantaire says dubiously, wriggling into his jacket as they go outside. It's bitterly cold, being January and all, but it's dry and the sun is actually out, which is nice. And the air out here doesn't smell of coffee, which is honestly something of a relief. He isn't sure exactly where they're going to walk to – there isn't much around here besides the train station – but he doesn't ask.

“Um.” Enjolras jams his hands in his pockets and pointedly doesn't look at him. He gives another of those breathy, humourless laughs. “Sorry, this must seem so bizarre.”

“A little,” Grantaire admits with a shrug. “Let me guess. The paper wants to do a big feature about the coffee shop. A small business valiantly fighting off the ever-approaching threat of Starbucks. Best coffee for miles. All that stuff.”

Enjolras laughs again, and it puffs out in a white cloud in the cold air, and it sounds a little more genuine this time.

“Afraid not,” he says.

“That's too bad,” Grantaire says.

“Have you worked there long?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, I worked there part-time when I was still at high school. Then, after I graduated, I left, but...well. I came back. And Mabeuf gave me a job again. He's good like that.”

“You left?” Enjolras asks, and of course that's the one part of that explanation he'd pick up on. He's looking at Grantaire curiously; Grantaire smiles faintly back.

“Not to rush you or anything, but I need to go pick up my niece from school at three,” he says, glancing at his watch. “So we've got about half an hour.”

“Your niece?” Enjolras blinks. “Oh. The little girl from the party?”

“Yeah. What, did you think she was mine?” Grantaire can't help but laugh. Him, a parent. Dear God.

“I didn't think anything,” Enjolras says.

“She's my sister's kid. But my sister's a nurse, which means crazy shifts, so I get Emeline on Mondays,” Grantaire tells him. Enjolras opens his mouth, most likely to ask everyone's favourite question – _'doesn't she have a dad?' -_ but seems to think better of it.

“That's nice,” he says instead. Grantaire looks at his watch again.

“Twenty-six minutes,” he says.

They stop walking. They are nowhere in particular – on an unremarkable street corner, opposite a bank. Grantaire's car is parked in exactly the opposite direction.

“What is it, Enjolras?” Grantaire asks, because he has to know, because this is confusing and unreal and like something out of a dream.

“It's...” Enjolras hesitates, looks away, and this isn't _like him,_ none of this is like him, and Grantaire has to wonder if he can even presume to know what he's like anymore. “There's really no way for me to say it without sounding like an idiot.” He pauses again. “It's almost nine years late, you see.”

Grantaire feels something cold and heavy squirming in the pit of his stomach. He says nothing; just frowns, questioningly.

“It's about that day,” Enjolras goes on. “The last time we saw each other before...all this.”

Grantaire swears under his breath without really knowing why and turns away. He jams his hands in his pockets, and not just because of the cold. He doesn't like where this is going. His fingers want to fidget. He'd probably be a smoker if he could afford it, just to keep his hands busy at times like this.

“I told myself that maybe you forgot about it, because we were kids and now we're not, and you shouldn't care what a stupid kid said to you way back when,” Enjolras is saying to his back. “But it doesn't really work that way.”

“I remember, yeah,” Grantaire says without turning around. “I kind of hoped you'd forgotten.”

“I've thought about it a lot,” Enjolras says. “Combeferre and Courfeyrac can attest to that. Apparently it's my favourite thing to whine about when I'm drunk.”

Grantaire groans quietly to himself. To him, the one saving grace of the things that had been said that day was that they had been between him and Enjolras alone. Jehan knows, true, but that was _different,_ Jehan hadn't been _part_ of that time and place.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, and _damnit_ he still likes the way his name sounds when he says it; Enjolras never did say it very often, and it always felt _special_ when he did, like Grantaire had properly got his attention, and this is fucked up and he knows it.

He gives up and turns around. Enjolras looks nervous but resolute.

“I've owed you an apology for a long time and I'd like to give it to you now,” he says.

Grantaire blinks. A car goes by a little too close to the pavement and sends a shower of cold slush over his shoes and the bottoms of his jeans. He doesn't notice.

“What?” he says finally.

“I wanted to say that I'm sorry,” Enjolras says. “For the things I said that day.”

Grantaire blinks a few times more.

“What?” he says again.

“I said, I-”

“No, I heard you, I'm just...” Grantaire's hands escape his pockets and start doing weird things in the air. “I'm just massively confused.”

“You said you remembered that day,” Enjolras says, and now he looks confused too.

“I do. Vividly. Believe me.”

“Then you remember that I said some...really horrible things.”

“You didn't say anything that wasn't true,” Grantaire mutters. After all, _that_ was what made the whole thing so awful – it wouldn't hurt half as much if the insults hadn't been so accurate, and if all the unkind predictions hadn't turned out to be correct.

Enjolras stares at him for a long, long moment, mouth slightly open.

“None of it was true,” he says finally. Grantaire laughs helplessly.

“Every word of it was true,” he says. He spreads his arms wide. “I mean, look at me. Isn't this pretty much exactly what you said my life would be? You were right about everything. And don't say you didn't mean it. You meant it, and you were right.”

He's startled when Enjolras grabs his upper arm in a punishingly tight grip that he can feel even through his jacket. His blue eyes are blazing, desperate.

“If I meant it, it was only because I was a stupid little shit who didn't know anything about _anything._ ” Enjolras doesn't look nervous anymore – he looks more like his old self, more like the teenager Grantaire remembers, the one who would never back down when he had a point to make. “I wasn't right, I was just being cruel. I was angry that day, and I took it out on you. God, at least let me apologise for that.”

“You can apologise for anything you want,” Grantaire tells him. “I'm just saying you don't need to.”

Enjolras stares at him a while more. Then he groans. Then he laughs.

“This...is not going how I expected,” he remarks, shaking his head and laughing in the shaky sort of way that comes from being pumped full of adrenaline that you suddenly have no use for.

“Sorry,” Grantaire says, smiling despite himself.

“Oh, shut up,” Enjolras says in a voice that might have been fierce if he wasn't still laughing. “Shut up, the word 'sorry' is not allowed to come out of your mouth. God. I thought you'd be _angry,_ I thought you must have just been trying really hard not to punch me ever since Boxing Day. And now you tell me that it's _fine_ and I don't have to apologise?”

“You don't.” Grantaire shrugs. “I was never angry with you.”

“Fuuuuck.” Enjolras was never one for cursing, but he seems to savour the feeling of this one rolling off his tongue. He sighs heavily at the sky before fixing Grantaire with a scowl. “You should have been.”

“Well, I wasn't,” Grantaire says. Enjolras peers at him, considering.

“Were you upset?” he asks.

Grantaire doesn't answer. Enjolras isn't laughing anymore.

“That's probably worse, actually. If you weren't even angry to go along with it,” Enjolras says. Grantaire shrugs.

“It was a long time ago,” he says.

“It was,” Enjolras agrees. “But one of my best friends is a lawyer, so I know that no one becomes less culpable with the passing of time.”

“You've felt bad about this,” Grantaire says, the realisation only starting to fully hit him now, “for all this time.”

“And you thought I meant it all this time,” Enjolras says. “I really don't think I even meant it back then, not even when I was that young and stupid. And now...God. I think it was the worst thing I ever did. It was despicable of me. Especially when I realised what you'd actually been trying to tell me-”

“Let's not go there,” Grantaire interrupts, feeling his face burn. He always does his best not to think about that. Not even Jehan knows that part of the story.

“I'm sorry,” Enjolras says, and he's so serious and so _sincere,_ and Grantaire can hardly look at him. “I'm sorry I said all those horrible things to you and I'm sorry you've believed them all this time.”

“It's fine,” Grantaire tells him, because it is. The words from that day still cut him up inside, the truth and the spite of them, but that's alright, that's as it should be. And the idea that Enjolras has actually spent the better part of a decade worrying about his hurt feelings is sort of...insane in a kind of beautiful way. It's like something he'd dream about, because he's fucked up like that. “You don't have to feel bad about it anymore.”

“This isn't about _me_ ,” Enjolras says, exasperated. “God, I almost forgot how difficult you are.”

“Glad to remind you.”

“I know that I can't claim to know much about you, but it seems like you have a good life here,” Enjolras says. “I mean, you're working, which a lot of people aren't right now. You're close with your family. You have...Jean?”

“Jehan,” Grantaire says with a nod as he remembers _oh yeah, that's right, Jehan and I are fake-dating._

“Right. So. God. Don't go thinking that all of that is worthless just because of what some stupid teenager said to you. Don't do that.”

Grantaire shakes his head, bemused and disbelieving.

“When I found out you were at that party, I didn't want to see you,” he admits. “I was sure you'd tell me I turned out to be just as pathetic as you predicted.”

“I guess I can't blame you for thinking that,” Enjolras says. “I didn't exactly leave you with the best impression of me.”

“I just want you to understand why I'm so thrown by this.” Grantaire wants to say more, too; he wants to tell him that a large part of the reason he's so surprised and confused is that he always knew Enjolras was amazing, but he never knew he could actually be _nice_ , but there's really no way for him to say that without it sounding like a very odd insult. Instead, he just says, “This is really the last thing I ever thought you'd want to talk about.”

“Well, as I said, Courfeyrac and Combeferre can attest that it's been on my mind,” Enjolras tells him with a rueful smile. “I feel like it's too late to make much difference now, but I'm glad I could finally say it, at least. When we were still at college, we came home from Paris sometimes for the holidays, and I always hoped I'd bump into you. But I never did, and none of us knew where you lived. And you're a hard person to find on facebook.”

“You facebook-stalked me?” Grantaire doesn't know whether to be flattered, alarmed or just amused.

“I tried.” Enjolras only looks the tiniest bit embarrassed about that. “Never did find you.”

“I actually don't have facebook,” Grantaire says.

“Me neither,” Enjolras admits, and Grantaire had suspected as much because he may or may not have used Jehan's account on a few drunken nights to try and find him. “I use Courfeyrac's when I feel nosey.” He frowns suddenly. “You know, I really thought I'd feel better after talking to you about this. It actually just feels like I've brought it all back to the surface again.”

“Sorry about that,” Grantaire says. “You really didn't need to worry about it.”

“Stop saying that. Yes I did. It was horrible and you didn't deserve it.” Enjolras sighs. “Though, like I said, I guess saying sorry after almost nine years doesn't make much difference.”

“No, it does. It...yeah.” Grantaire doesn't know exactly how to explain how the words 'you didn't deserve it' make him feel, so he decides not to try. “I mean. Thanks, I think. I mean I'm still confused as all hell. But thanks.”

“And now you're thanking me.” Enjolras sighs again. “You're a nightmare. Are you sure you don't want to hit me, just once?”

“I'm sure.”

“Right. Okay. Right.” Enjolras nods a few times. “Then I guess we're done here.”

“I guess?” Part of Grantaire doesn't want them to be done and would be content to stand with Enjolras on this cold street corner with his shoes full of slush forever, but another part of him is thoroughly frazzled by all the weird and wonderful events of the day and is fully ready to run away and hide for a while.

“Which way do you need to go to get your niece?” Enjolras asks.

Grantaire wordlessly points back the way they came.

“Right. Well, I'll take a walk the other way, then, before this gets painfully awkward.” Enjolras smiles thinly and moves back a few paces. “I'll see you around. Probably.”

“It's a small town,” Grantaire agrees.

Neither of them says 'goodbye'. The situation just seems too strange for them to add any vestige of normality to it now. They go their separate ways. Grantaire manages to only look back once.

~ 

Later that evening, Grantaire is safely ensconced in his apartment, and the whole exchange with Enjolras has already started to seem like a weird dream he had. His main piece of evidence that it really happened is Jehan, who had come over true to his word and is now practically climbing all over him for details.

“What did he want?” he's asking, tugging on Grantaire's arm, which is very unhelpful and slightly dangerous since Grantaire is in the middle of trying to cook dinner. “Was it so bad that you don't even want to tell me?”

“No.” Grantaire shrugs him off before they can both get sprayed with bubbling pasta sauce.

“Then tell me,” Jehan whines, dragging each word out. His fingers are scrabbling at the back of Grantaire's shirt now.

“It was a private conversation,” Grantaire informs him, turning his head to hide his smile.

“You still need to tell me! You're the one who texted me at work looking for sagely advice!”

“Which you failed to provide, as I remember.”

“I told you to punch him and I still think that's the best way to deal with guys like him.”

“See, talking about him is only going to upset you,” Grantaire says, shaking his head and giving his best sad sigh as he puts a lid on the pot and turns the heat down low. He leaves the kitchen and goes back into the living room, where Emeline is sitting far too close to the television, totally engrossed in 'The Little Mermaid'. Grantaire opens his mouth to tell her to move back before her eyes turn square, but he gets maybe one word out before Jehan tackles him from behind and sends him sprawling face-first onto the couch. And then proceeds to sit on top of him.

“You monster,” Grantaire says, and it's a concerted effort not to say much worse than that, but his adorable niece is in the room, after all. He manages to twist around so that he's at least on his back and doesn't have his face mashed into the cushions. Jehan just perches there and starts pummelling his chest with both fists.

“Tell me everything _now_ ,” he orders.

“You're so nosey,” Grantaire informs him with a grin.

“I am,” Jehan agrees. “This is a big thing and I will properly explode if you don't tell me all about it.”

“I'd like to see that.”

“Emeline, come help me torture your horrible uncle,” Jehan calls, and a moment later she's leaning over the arm of the sofa and her laughing face is hovering over Grantaire's.

“Aren't you supposed to be on my side?” he asks her. She just giggles, and then some dastardly tag-team tickling starts, and he fights back while always being sure not to actually hurt either of them, and they're all laughing, and all he can think of is Enjolras saying ' _don't go thinking that all of that is worthless_ _'._ And for the first time he feels like maybe he can start to believe that – that _his_ life, while by no means a success, has some intrinsic worth because of the people around him, because of moments like _this._ He can't tell Jehan any of that, though – it would only make him angry or upset or both because he's never done telling him that he matters and he's loved and all that stuff, and he'd probably scowl and say _'you won't believe it when I say it but you'll believe it when it comes from_ him?' And it probably doesn't make sense that it means so much coming from Enjolras. But the thing is, Enjolras is not his friend, Enjolras has absolutely no reason to care about how Grantaire thinks of himself or his life, and so he has no reason to say anything nice unless he thinks it's the truth. That's the logic, anyway.

“Yield or die,” Jehan is saying, red-faced and pouting.

“Alright, alright. God. I yield!” Grantaire puts his hands up. Emeline, who has no idea what they're even arguing about, cheers happily and goes back to her movie.

“Excellent.” Instead of getting off him, Jehan flops down on top of him at his full length, folding his arms on Grantaire's chest and propping his chin on them.

“You're heavy,” Grantaire informs him.

“I'm a dainty woodland sprite,” Jehan replies. “Now tell me what your mean not-ex-boyfriend said to you.”

“He said he was sorry,” Grantaire says without further preamble. “For...y'know.”

Jehan blinks down at him.

“He did?” he says finally, voice full of incredulity.

“Yeah.” Grantaire nods. “Sorry for everything. Said he was wrong and that he didn't mean any of it.”

“Do you believe him?” Jehan peers at him, daring him to lie.

“I believe that he's sorry. I almost believe that he didn't mean it, or at least that he regrets it now.”

“But you don't believe what he said was wrong.”

“Still working on that part.”

Jehan scowls and thumps his chest again, harder than before. The scowl fades quickly, though; he looks thoughtful.

“He really asked to talk to you just so he could properly apologise? After all this time?” he says.

“He said he never stopped feeling bad about it,” Grantaire tells him. “Said he wanted to tell me this whole time and that his friends are sick of hearing him whine about it.” He shakes his head. “He tried to facebook-stalk me, Jehan.”

“The truest sign of affection, to be sure.”

“I can't believe he even thought about it,” Grantaire says in wonder, staring at the ceiling. Jehan hums non-committally and rests his head on Grantaire's breastbone, turning to look at the TV just as Ariel stumbles out of the sea on her new legs. He's quiet for a few long minutes; Grantaire tentatively touches a hand to his hair, still in the neat braid that he only really wears for work.

“You alright?” he asks uncertainly.

“Yeah,” Jehan says.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Hm.” Jehan sounds a little sulky. “Just that Enjolras might be at least a little braver and a little less despicable than I initially thought. I may have to reconsider my judgement of him.”

Grantaire laughs.

“That would be nice,” he says.

Emeline turns around, probably to tell them to be quiet because this is a _very important part,_ but she pauses and furrows her brow at the sight of them properly sprawled one on top of the other.

“Are you two going to get married?” she asks. There's a beat of silence during which they both stare at her.

“No?” Grantaire says slowly at great length.

“Oh.” She looks a little disappointed. “Grandma said you might.”

Jehan turns so that Emeline can't see the poisonous look he's shooting Grantaire's way.

“Grandma was probably kidding,” Grantaire tells her.

“Oh,” she says again. She shuffles closer to the sofa. “But if you ever do get married, can I come to your wedding?”

“You can come to both our weddings no matter who we marry,” Jehan says with a smile. He slides off Grantaire and sits on the floor next to her, probably to make them look somewhat less affectionate.

“But why not each other?” Emeline complains. “Then you could be my uncle too.”

“It's Jehan's fault,” Grantaire says seriously. “It's because he's too pretty. He has to marry a handsome prince.”

“You could be a handsome prince,” she says with every ounce of indignant fury she can muster.

“Nah.” He leans over to mess up her hair. “I'm the frog that doesn't transform no matter how many times you kiss it.” He kisses her on the nose to demonstrate. She giggles but still looks set to argue the matter, so he gets to his feet.

“Better check on the food,” he says, escaping to the kitchen. He's sure the debate will resume later, and he knows for a fact that Jehan is going to rip him to shreds later for still having not set his mother straight about the whole fake-dating debacle. In all honestly, it had completely slipped his mind; he'd thought that whole charade had come to its natural conclusion after Boxing Day, because he'd assumed he wouldn't see Enjolras again for a long, long time. But now he knows that isn't the case. And that complicates matters.

But he'll think about it another day. If he kept a diary, he'd probably write an entire novel about today, and get it typed up and bound and kept as a historical document. Today was bizarre and awkward and marvellous, and that's all he wants to think about right now.

~

Enjolras is creeping up to his room with a glass of water and a pizza on a plate when his phone rings. When he'd first moved back in, his parents had insisted that the three of them sit down and eat together at mealtimes – meals that one or the other of them had cooked, and they wouldn't hear of him cooking for them, probably for good reason – but that had felt rather too much like a return to childhood, so he'd asked them to excuse him from the tradition. It was a matter of pride, really. It did not mean, however, that he is actually any good at cooking for himself. His section of the freezer is full of things that only require ten minutes in an oven and no further preparation.

He opens the door to his room with his elbow, sets his dinner down on the desk and grabs his phone from his pocket.

“ _I got your text,”_ Courfeyrac says gleefully when he answers. _“I can't believe it. You finally did it. It's over.”_

“Yeah, yeah,” Enjolras says, rolling his eyes. “Honestly, I can't believe it either. What were even the chances of meeting him like that? Did you know he works in that coffee shop?”

“ _I did not. Clearly it was destiny that brought you together.”_

“Ha ha,” Enjolras says dryly around a mouthful of pizza.

“ _So come on, spill! Did it go alright?”_

“Fine, I guess. He wasn't angry or anything.”

“ _I told you he wouldn't be.”_

“I know you did. Doesn't mean it makes sense."

“ _...What's wrong? You don't sound happy. I thought you'd be celebrating or something.”_

“I don't know.” Enjolras pushes his plate away from him, suddenly not feeling so hungry. “It was just...strange. Anti-climactic.”

“ _Because he didn't yell at you or cry or punch you or something?”_

“More than anything, he just seemed confused that I'd want to apologise. I don't know if that means he thinks he deserved all that shit I said, or if he just thinks I'm a total heartless monster who would never think to say sorry. Maybe both.”

“ _Enjolras,”_ Courfeyrac groans. _“I thought the whole point of you making this big apology was so that you didn't have to mope about this anymore?”_

“Sorry,” Enjolras says. “Sorry, you're right. Whatever. It's done.”

“ _How was your first day at work, anyway?”_

Enjolras grimaces, only glad that Courfeyrac can't see.

“It went as you might expect,” he says.

“ _Ah.”_

“I don't really want to talk about it,” Enjolras sighs.

“ _Are you alright?”_

“I'm fine, yeah.” Lying to Courfeyrac is a lot easier over the phone. “Probably just tired. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“ _Sure.”_

Enjolras hangs up and flops down glumly on his bed. He hates his new job already. The newspaper is awful, even compared to other small-town local papers. Hardly anyone buys it, and it must be one of the last paper publications in all of Europe that doesn't have an online archive yet. Enjolras doesn't know how it's even still running. The front page article for the last issue was about a pothole that has appeared in the road outside the local supermarket. It pushes the boundaries of mundane.

And the whole operation is run by a group of ageing men, who are set in their outdated ways and will probably take the newspaper with them when they retire since no one seems to want to replace them. They are of the generation where, if you wanted to be a journalist, you came to work for a paper when you were sixteen and worked your way up from there. They had taken one look at Enjolras's university degree and got a look on their faces that said they thought he was far too bourgeois for the likes of them. Enjolras has a sneaking suspicion that they only agreed to hire him because they knew they'd find genuine pleasure in bossing him around.

He sighs irritably. He hates this room, too. Not because he was unhappy in it as a child – in fact, he has a lot of very happy memories of this house – but simply because of the fact that he's back sleeping in it again. It's another thing that stings his pride. When he'd come back, it had still been exactly the way he'd left it when he departed for Paris nearly nine years ago – the walls covered with high school awards, certificates from debating competitions, and newspaper clippings of all the times that he and his friends had, ironically, made the local news by one minor achievement or other. He'd torn them all down. They don't mean anything now.

He sighs again. He's a mess.

But, he supposes, at least he did finally manage to apologise to Grantaire. Everything else is currently a disaster, but he can cross that off his bucket list. Even if it was weird and anti-climactic, and even if Grantaire seemed to want the apology less than he wanted Enjolras to stop feeling like an apology was required.

“Ugh,” he says to no one in particular.

~ 

It's not until the following Wednesday that Grantaire sees Enjolras again. He'd assumed that the guys running the paper had just sort of noticed they had a highly qualified and very talented journalist on their hands and had decided to make better use of him, but he trudges in, shivering and irritable-looking, on Wednesday morning. The shop is quiet once again; the morning rush is over, all the commuters are gone, but it's still rather too early for many people to venture out for coffee with a friend.

“Hey,” Grantaire says, smiling, once Enjolras finishes stomping the snow off his shoes and comes up to the counter. It's started snowing again. This was cause for great delight back at Christmas time, but seems to be causing nothing but annoyance and inconvenience now.

“Morning,” Enjolras replies. He makes an attempt at returning the smile but doesn't do very well. He fishes another piece of paper out of his pocket and holds it out. “Here we go again.”

“Hey, it's been over a week,” Grantaire points out as he glances at the orders. “I know doing the coffee run is annoying, but at least it's not every day.”

“It has been every day,” Enjolras says dully. “I just didn't come here the other days.”

Grantaire looks over his shoulder at him from the coffee machine, surprised. And maybe a little hurt, as ridiculous as that is. He remembers the gut-wrenching horror that had gone through him when Enjolras had walked in here last Monday; there had been none of that today. Without any conscious decision-making about it on his part, he'd just been happy to see him. Because maybe sometimes he doesn't want Enjolras to see him, but there's never really a time he doesn't want to see Enjolras.

“...I thought maybe you wouldn't want me to come here,” Enjolras mutters when he notices his look. “I thought it might be- I don't know. Weird.”

“You think we'd turn down a coffee order this big?” Grantaire asks, holding up the piece of paper. He comes over to set the first filled cup on the counter and pauses there a moment. “Seriously, though. It's fine. It's, y'know. Good to catch up.”

“Well I'm glad you think so because everyone in the office has started complaining that they don't like the coffee I was getting from the other place,” Enjolras admits with a small and slightly strangled laugh. Grantaire strongly suspects that Enjolras gives precisely zero fucks about the preferences of his coworkers.

“That's because we're the best, obviously,” Grantaire says with a shrug. “Anyway, I bet the other place didn't give you free coffee.”

“That's very true,” Enjolras admits.

“And here, you're free to tell me what a bunch of assholes your colleagues are. Really, this place is superior in every way.”

“You're right,” Enjolras says with a faint smile. “Those are some very good selling points.”

“Good. Then I expect to see you in here tomorrow,” Grantaire says as the coffee machine rattles to life again.

And he does.

Grantaire doesn't always have the morning shift in the shop, but every day that he does for the whole month of January, Enjolras appears, every morning like clockwork. It's something of a mixed blessing – seeing him so frequently is sort of like one of Grantaire's tamer teenage fantasies brought to life, but he's also very aware that Enjolras is less than happy about being errand boy to a bunch of lazy old men, and so he can't help but feel somewhat guilty about looking forward to his visits. Which he does, he realises very quickly. In the beginning he's a little apprehensive, always worrying that he'll say the wrong thing or make a fool of himself, or self-conscious on the days that he looks even more disastrous than usual, but soon the whole thing becomes routine, and it's almost comfortable, and instead of worrying he finds himself checking the clock every few minutes like a love-sick schoolboy. Maybe he just is a love-sick schoolboy. It certainly feels like he's regressing to that stage of his life. But considering that he and Enjolras are actually on civil terms now, he's at least making a better job of it than he did first time around.

Sometimes Enjolras is in a hurry and only has time for a quick exchange of pleasantries before he hurries away with his bulk order, but on other days he's either been told there's no rush or he's simply so pissed that he's deliberately taking his sweet time, and the two of them will talk. Despite Enjolras's apology and Grantaire's insistence that he has nothing to apologise for, they don't talk about high school. Grantaire asks after Combeferre and Courfeyrac; Enjolras asks after his family and Jehan, despite not knowing any of them.

“Do you and Jean have plans for Valentine's Day?” he asks at the start of February. Grantaire remembers all over again that he and Jehan are supposed to be an item.

“Um.” He flounders a moment, trying desperately to think what he and Jehan would do for that holiday if they were, in fact, dating. “Not really. Nothing big or special. Probably just like. Pizza and movies or something.”

“I guess this isn't your first Valentine's as a couple, then?” Enjolras says with a faint smile.

“Huh?” Grantaire says helplessly.

“Not that I'm an expert, but don't people normally get very...obnoxiously romantic on their first Valentine's Day together?” Enjolras says as he hands Grantaire the money to pay for the day's coffee. “Fancy restaurants, red roses, giant stuffed animals? Or is that only in movies?”

“Uh.” Grantaire has no idea; he's never actually spent Valentine's Day with anyone before. “Yeah, we totally did all that stuff first time around. Didn't really take. Jehan doesn't like fancy places anyway.” And that much is true, at the very least; he can roll with this. “They can be so condescending. Apparently you can judge a person's character and find them lacking based on the fact that they have tattoos. You don't really have that problem with a pizza delivery guy.”

“That's a shame.” Enjolras shakes his head, frowning. “People can be so stupid.”

“Yeah,” Grantaire says with a nervous laugh, giving him his change.

He calls Jehan that night.

“We need a backstory,” he declares. “Romantic backstory. How long we've been together, stuff like that. We need to decide these things. Enjolras keeps asking questions that I should totally know the answers to and I totally don't.”

“ _We don't need a backstory, we need to end this stupid act,”_ Jehan replies grouchily. The prospect of spending another Valentine's Day single has him in a permanently sullen mood. Grantaire gave up long ago, but Jehan still takes love very seriously.

“I can't fake-dump you this close to Valentine's Day,” Grantaire says, aghast. “That'd make me a total asshole.”

Jehan groans and hangs up on him.

To get back in his good graces at least a little, Grantaire makes a point of going to visit his mother, to break the news to her that actually, no, Jehan is never going to be her son-in-law.

It does not go according to plan.

“This is such good timing,” she says happily after she's forced a cup of tea and at least two slices of cake upon him. “I'd been meaning to pop into see you. I have something for you.”

“For me?” he says warily. His birthday is not for quite some time.

“Well, for you and Jehan.” She fishes in her purse and pulls out a white envelope and hands it to him. “I know the two of you work so hard, and I just thought...well. It's going to be Valentine's Day soon, and I wanted to treat you both.”

_Oh God, no,_ Grantaire manages not to say. He opens the envelope. _Oh God. Noooo._

Later that evening, he and Jehan are sitting on Jehan's bed with the contents of the envelope lying between them. Neither of them seems to want to touch it.

“That,” Jehan says, “is a voucher for a four-star restaurant.”

“I know,” Grantaire says. They're both staring at it like it might explode.

“We can't use it,” Jehan says, shaking his head furiously. “For so many reasons.”

“I know, but what else are we supposed to do with it?” Grantaire groans.

“You shouldn't have taken it!” Jehan practically shrieks, throwing a pillow at his face. “You should have told her the truth!”

“You go tell her, I literally couldn't!” Grantaire throws the pillow right back. “She's so happy, and she just wants to make us happy! I tried not to take it and she looked like she was going to cry!”

“Oh _God,”_ Jehan moans, covering his face with his hands. “This is awful, it's gone on so long that we're going to have to stage a break-up, and then we're going to have to act sad and awkward around each other, and it's going to be ridiculous and I hate you.”

In the end, Grantaire takes the voucher home with him and pins it up next to his New Year's resolutions, where it will stay until he and Jehan can think of the most ethical way to get rid of it.

Also, it turns out he wasn't really lying to Enjolras: he and Jehan do in fact end up spending the evening of Valentine's Day together, and it is spent on Grantaire's couch, and they do indeed eat pizza and watch movies. Jehan picks the movies. Grantaire notices the common theme about halfway through _Fatal Attraction_ : they are all movies that, in one way or another, make you glad to be single. They don't seem to be working on Jehan, though.

“Cheer up,” Grantaire tells him while the credits roll. “Don't worry, you'll meet someone.”

“When?” Jehan asks sulkily.

“I don't know. When you're supposed to meet them, I guess. Maybe you've already met them.”

Jehan pulls a face.

“I hope not,” he says. “That would be disappointing.”

Grantaire laughs and helps himself to another slice of pizza.

“Are you ever going to ask Enjolras out?” Jehan asks suddenly.

“What? No,” Grantaire snorts.

“Why not? You still like him. Don't even deny it.”

“He thinks I'm dating you, for one thing.”

“But you're not. Maybe start by telling him that.”

“I'm not asking him out. Ever. Anyway, we're not even friends, we're just...two people brought together by other people's need for coffee.”

“You think he'd say no,” Jehan says, wrinkling his nose in irritation. Grantaire sighs.

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure he'd say no,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because.” Grantaire flails his arms and comes very close to showering the two of them in pizza topping. “Because he is really beautiful and really smart and-”

“What, and you're not worthy?” Jehan kicks him. “Don't give me that shit.”

“Last time I checked, you hated Enjolras,” Grantaire points out. “Now you want me to date him?”

“ _I_ don't want you to. But you want to.”

“Let's just focus on finding you your Prince or Princess Charming,” Grantaire says, slinging an arm around Jehan's shoulders with a smile. “Believe me, with Enjolras, I'm more than happy just to be the guy who serves him coffee.”

“That is really quite sad,” Jehan says dully.


End file.
